Conclusion
We learned much about programming and printed circuit boards over the course of this lab. Designing our own PCB brought us much closer to becoming professional computer scientists or electrical engineers, but also instilled in us a healthy respect for people who work with dangerous tools and troublesome programs to text and produce new PCBs. The SCC-on-a-PIC set performs wonderfully as a teaching tool, at least in terms of how much we learned while designing it. Since one of our main concerns about using Altera design tools was the difficulty of debugging on a system that had very little output to tell us what was happening inside it. This setup is far more informative. Likewise, though coding the program segments to run using a computer is quickest, the PIC can function without one with appreciable ease. This design also greatly enhances usability and learning value by allowing the user to alter register and memory contents on the fly, as a program is running. Thus, true to its intended purpose as a teaching tool, the PIC board emulates a Swarthmore Simple Computer in a very transparent manner, and requires little more than a knowledge of hex, a table of instruction codes, and a few minutes of experimentation to use proficiently.
Alexandr Pshenichkin and Cortland Setlow
Swarthmore College