430W:
I had Dennis Dunn for this class. If you have him, here's what to expect:
-Tests are worth only 15%
-You have to write about 120 pages worth of documents (4 different papers, each building on each other) in a group of 4
-You will spend a lot of time in the IST Building and the Machine Shop working on your robot which you have a lot of control over and do not have a set class time to work on (in groups of 4)
-A good portion of your grade is dependent (~15-30%) on the functionality of your robot

471:
I had Kyusun Choi for this class. I have also heard that Chita Das teaches this class. In any event, it is a good class to take if you liked/found 271 to be an easy class. The main objective of the class is to build a minor microprocessor with about 4 or 5 different commands (store/load/add/subtract) which is more complex than the one in 331. You get a lot of help on the project but you get to use the Windows version of Modelsim which makes it a lot easier than using the ones in UNIX. The lectures and homeworks are straight forward, and Choi's practice exams are basically the real ones except for him changing a few numbers. This makes getting an A very easy.

472:
Dr. Coraor taught this class when I took it and he is probably the best professor in our department. You learn how the Motorola 68HC12 microcontroller works almost from top to bottom. There are homeworks throughout the class that show you how to code the chip to do basic tasks. If you like the idea of learning hardware-software interactions, take the class, it definitely looks good on a resume that you can do embedded programming (i.e. writing a program that can run on one chip and control common electronic devices around the house).

477:
If you liked 471 and the EE courses you took, take this class. I had Yuan Xie for this class, and he made it easy to get a decent grade by giving a lot of extra credit. He knew the material was really hard so he made it easier on us. It is a lot of work but it is rewarding. The semester group project (in our case the 2 of us did a 16 bit Carry-Select and Carry Lookahead Adder) will take a lot of time as you have to build it at the transistor level, which is close to 1000 transistors. It is really tedious.

Notes on other classes and other highlights will be added later.

On November 19^th, 2005 the PSU ACM will be at the hub latenight HotSpot from 10pm until 1am. Come stop by to play games with the ACM officers and win some prizes.

Update: The powerpoint presentation from the event has been uploaded to the site.

This year we once again sent two teams to the Mid-Atlantic region competition.

The White Team: Atilla Bora, Ilya Lipnitskiy, and Vincent Roscioli
The Blue Team: David Cairns, Brad Volkin, and Timothy Misiak

The White team placed 7^th out of 126 teams, claiming the top spot at the Shippensburg site. The Blue Team took 3^rd at the competition and 29^th in the region. Last year we finished 14^th and 29^th. This is the third year in a row that our teams have improved. Congratulations to everyone and we hope to get both teams to nationals next year.