Reflective Journal 3

A new week has arrive and with it comes new challenges as well as new experiences. So what have I experience this week you may ask? Well its something I have not touch in a while and it was a good exercise to recall back what I've learned. This week's class was about importing circuits from Multisim to Ultiboard. First off, we had to 'design' or more or less assemble the circuit from the schematic which was given by En. Redzuan in Multisim.

The above diagram is the circuit which has been assembled in Multisim. As we can see here, some of the components are blue in colour and some are in black. Why the difference in colours? This is to show whether the components we are using are virtual components (non-existing components) or whether we are using real components (components existing in the market). What we want is so that all the components we are using are real components and this is done by choosing a footprint for each of the components that we are using. After doing that the circuit should look like below.

Now all the components are blue in colour which indicates that they are real components and if you look closely, the 12V DC input has been replace with another component. That is an input for the source. This is because a 12V DC source is not a real existing component and has to be replace with something that is real. Only after this done, and all the components that are in our circuit are real components can we then export our design to Ultiboard.

The above is how it will look like after we transfer the circuit over to Ultiboard. As we can see, the components are all situated on the top left hand corner and the rectangular space is our board that we are going to mount our components on. We can also crop the board into what ever shape we like.

After cropping my board is now in the shape of an oval. After that we drag and place the components where we want it to be on the board.

The above is the result after placing the components on the board. When we are doing this, we have to consider where the connectors go so that they do not overlap. At this stage, we also edit the size of the connectors to make sure it is not too thin. This is a very crucial stage as an overlapping connector or a connector which is too thin can cause the program to produce an error message when we finalize the design later on.

The above is the finalize design with no errors and viewed in 3D form.

And this is the view from below. We can clearly see the connectors which will be on the printed circuit board that we want to create here. So basically that was what we learned in En.Redzuan's class this week. Awaiting what is in store for us next week. Till then, sayonara. 

Reflective Journal 2

This week marks the 4th week of our life here in MJIIT. Hooray! Its been almost a month and things are going smoothly so far. So this week's class on Introduction to Electronic System Engineering is done in the electronics lab. It was a first for many entering the lab but for us, former UTM diploma students, its a nostalgic feeling entering back into this lab and i can't help but reminisce about the times we used to spend here. So this week class started with Dr.Kamal telling us a thing or two about our blogs.

He gave us valuable input like how we are graded on our journal writing, what are the key points that we should have in our writing and tips on how a good journal entry should be. One of the key points that he mention was that our journals not only reflect how we feel about the class, but also what we gain from the lesson or on how we apply the knowledge that we have gain from the class. After that short session on our journal writing with Dr.Kamal, En.Redzuan took over an introduce to us what we are going to learn today.

So our main topic of the day was the introduction to Multisim. What is Multisim you ask? Well its a software use to simulate the behavior of a certain circuit we design. For example, if we wanted to know the amount of current flowing through a certain part of a circuit, instead of actually assembling the components together and then monitoring the results by using a meter, we can recreate the circuit we wanted to analyze virtually with this software and get the results that we want to know all from the simulation that was done. Easy. I used this application a number of times when i was doing my diploma to analyze circuits and to solve circuit-related problems. After the brief introduction on the software and also the basic know-hows of using the software, En.Redzuan gave us a task.

 The task was fairly simple. It was to assemble first circuit from the above diagram in Multisim and run the simulation. As it was not my first time using Multisim, the task was a piece of cake! A few of the other students did encounter problems like where the components were located on the tool bar. So as one of the senpai in the class I did my part by helping them out. After all of us complete the simulation, En.Redzuan showed us how to import the circuit that we design on Multisim to another software which is Ultiboard.

So what is Ultiboard then? Well it basically shows us the circuit we have designed in 3D form on a printed circuit board (PCB). What we can do here is set the positions of our components on the board and then later when we are satisfied with the positions, we can print out the schematics of the PCB. This will be taught in detail in next week's lecture. 

This is it for this week's reflection and looking forward to next week!