Assignments & More

I know it has been quite a long time since I posted a blog. I could not do so due to the fact that I had quite a few assignments last week. They were quite interesting really, I mean if you looked at it externally and not have to do it yourself.
My first assignment last week involved a C programming project,in which I had to code a maze. The main outline of this task was to read in a maze from a textfile and display it on to the screen. The user then had to be prompted to give the starting co-ordinates from where the maze had to be solved. The textfile consisted of a grid of x,p characters.X's denoted the walls, p denoted the path. The goal was denoted by g. The maze was confusing as it had many dead ends and junctions and my program was supposed to be able to go back everytime such a dead end was reached.
I spent a good part of my vacation figuring out the method I would adopt to solve it. In the end I was able to solve the maze and accomplish the task.
The second assignment might be a bit more interesting. It involved the design of an FPGA which sorted into ascending order, the 8 bit values that were inputted into it. The language used was VHDL which stands for Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description Language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vhdl. It is actually very much like C programming, but here u are actually able to construct and program hardware to make it do things u want it to . VHDL is an excellent tool as not only are you able to describe the behaviour of chip through programming, you are also able to modify the behaviour if you are unstatisfied with it. The program used to compile and simulate VHDL is ModelSim. The components for the sorter were placed on a simulated PCB using Xilinx, which gives the timing frequency and efficiency of the chip so created.
The sorter problem was very complicated as it involved the programming of many components which were embedded deep into the main layout.
The next assignment uses the sorter to detect a peak from a stram of data and display it onto a computer. I have been assigned a group for this task.
Anyway I shall continue to update this blog as an when I get an opportunity. Have fun and tc