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!