Part 4. The Project Report

Version 1.0, April 1998

Use Microsoft Word and Excel to present your report. If you have another wordprocessor and spreadsheet on your own computer then you may use these instead (for example the Lotus Notes system). Answer the following questions about the different parts of the project. Please keep you explanations concise, but at the same time provide reasons for your answers.

You should provide a diskette containing your data and any programmes for each pair. Label and document the contents of the diskette.

Each pair should hand in their reports together, with the above diskette, as stated earlier we expect individuals to write their own reports and provide individual answers to the questions below.

Part 1 (20%)

The stress meter that you constructed used skin resistance to measure 'stress', the analogue port of the PC provided the ADC to convert the experiment signal to a digital value. Two other measurements that you could have used are of heart rate or of skin temperature.

An ADC would be appropriate in the computer interface to measure one of these, but not the other, which one? What type of ADC would be most appropriate for such measurements? What precision and conversion speed would be needed for such an ADC?

For the measurement method for which an ADC would not be appropriate as the computer interface, can you suggest a simple way in which the computer could still be of use for measurements?

Part 2 (40%)

For programme 3, give a line-by-line account of what the QBASIC code is doing.

Detail your attempts to try to discover a substitute for the Stick(0) function. If you modified the QBASIC programme(s) to help with this substitution, describe what you did and why. If you used the Internet, say what you found and give any URLs that you think were useful.

If you wrote a C programme (or even the shell of a programme to show how this part could be achieved) then provide a listing, comments, and description of what it does.

Part 3 and Report (40%)

If you modified the QBASIC (or C) programme(s) to help vary the measurements to test the stress meter, then describe what you did to the programme(s).

Use Excel to analyse your data. Draw appropriate graphs to illustrate the analysis of how the meter worked.

Final Thoughts
Once we have a compiled program in either QuickBasic or in BC++, then by using a CGI (Common Gateway Interface) we can allow a client program to execute a program on a Web server, and to receive its output. Thus we could read a stress meter over the Internet for someone attached to a gameport on the Tiger server. However could we do the reverse, that is read the data from our stress meter, back into the Internet, for someone else to see, and at the same time see the results for their meter on their machine? We leave you to ponder this question.