Completing Labs in MITx: Thank Heaven for Trial and Error

Well, I solved Lab 3 with help from my wife and a hint from the discussion forum, and some late night persistence. In this problem we needed to build a series of digital gates that are connected to three voltage sources. Professor says an Intel chip has a billion gates, but our lab involved three, so we start small. Really small.

In Circuits and Electronics, we must complete a weekly lab, an assignment in which we must build a circuit that satisfies certain parameters. Part of the assignment involves getting the appropriate configuration of resistors, wires, and other elements, and another part of the assignment means getting the right values for these elements. It’s a rather safe way to do a lab in basic electrical engineering; I know the only shock I’ll receive is how many times I get the answer wrong.

A lot of my problems with this lab were due to my own ignorance about how to use the circuit sandbox. First, I did not know that you could cross wires in a diagram, which, it turned out, was necessary for the solution to the problem. Of course, crossing wires is acceptable because in an actual circuit, a wire can go over or under a different wire. In my crude diagram, you can see that the red voltage source (the circle) needs to be connected to the red gate (the diamond), so the wire must go over the other gate. I finally found a discussion posting that mentioned that you can cross wires, but another person said that this is in the directions in how to use the sandbox, so I’m to blame for not reading all the directions….One weakness I have is that I am spending more time trying to understand equations than trying to understand the common-sense rules for putting these things together.

But a funny thing is that I was able to get the correct answer by using trial and error to determine the resistance values for these gates. This seems rather unscientific to me, but one hour before the deadline makes me happy for any advantage I may get. And yet, wouldn’t a situation in an actual lab be much much different? For example, at one point, I put the resistance value of a MOSFet so high that I shorted part of the circuit. Now, in the sandbox, who cares, right? But surely this kind of guessing could be dangerous in a real circuit.

One thing I don’t like about the circuit sandbox is that I use “backspace” to delete elements after I’ve selected them. If I hit the button more than once, I go back in the web browser and lose my circuit.