Brown Dog Gadgets Crazy Circuits Bit Board User Guide
- June 5, 2024
- Brown Dog Gadgets
Table of Contents
Brown Dog Gadgets Crazy Circuits Bit Board
What You Need:
- 1 x Crazy Circuits Bit Board 1 x micro:bit
- 1 x 7 Segment Display
- 4 x Jumper Wires
- 4 x Slide Switch
- 1 x Jumbo Pushbutton
- 1 x LEGO Baseplate Misc. LEGO Pieces
- 1/8” Maker Tape
How it Works:
There are four switches that can be set to an on or off postion. The on
position is equal to 1, and the off position is equal to 0.
After setting each switch into a position to equal 1 or 0 you can press the
pushbutton to calculate the value.
With all four switches in the off position, the binary number 0000 would
translate to 0 in decimal.
When a switch is in the on the position you add the value for that switch (8,
4, 2, or 1) to the total which will be shown when you press the CALCULATE
button.
If the switches are off, on, off, on while reading left to right your binary
number would be 0101 and would add 0 + 4 + 0 + 1 for a total of 5.
Each time you press the CALCUATE button it resets the number to zero, and then
adds up the results of the switches and shows it on the 4 digit display
connected to the Bit Board.
Note: For more fun projects and educational guides visit us at BrownDogGadgets.com
Binary Numbering System
To the right is a chart showing how you would translate a binary number into a
decimal number. You can get any value between 0 and 15 with just four binary
digits. (This is a 4 bit register.) 1, 2, 4, and 8 are the only numbers we
need to accomplish our counting. If we need 3 we just add 1 and 2. If we need
7 we add 4 and 2 and 1, and so on up to 15.
If this is a 4 bit register, what would an 8 bit register look like? To start
with, you would have 8 digits instead of 4 and you would be able to count much
higher of course.
Here is our 8 bit register. It has 8 “slots” that we can toggle on/off to
create our decimal number. (And yes, each “slot” holds one bit which is why
this is referred to as 8 bit.)
If you examine the numbers from right to left you’ll notice that the next
digit is always one more than the total we can get using the previous numbers
combined.
For instance, 1 + 2 = 3, so we don’t need a 3 but we do need a 4 because we
can’t count to 4 just using 1 and 2. Likewise, 4 + 2 + 1 = 7, so the next
value we need is 8. This continutes on along the string of numbers. 64 + 32 +
16 + 8 + 4 + 2 + 1 = 127. If we add 127 and 128 we get 255. Now, if you’re
familiar with 8 bit and know that it’s related to the number 256, that’s
because we need to count zero! (A count from 0 to 255 gives us 256 values
because when computers count they count 0 as a valid value.)
These bits are part of a base 2 numbers system. While base 10 numbers look
like 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000, etc. Our base 2 numbers look like 2, 4, 8, 16,
32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384, etc.
With our 4 bits, that means 2 to the power of 4 (or 2 x 2 x 2 x 2) which
equals 16, and the highest value we can count to with our 8 bit register.
(Remember, we’re including zero, so 0 to 15 is really 16 values.)
The term ‘bit’ is short for ‘binary digit’
Binary Calculator Code
