The Kraken's Blog
When I was still studying electronics in college, I remember a project in microcontrollers class where the professor let us choose what we wanted to do. At that time, I was almost obsessed with neural networks and proposed to the professor that I would implement a network on a PIC16F877A (my favorite). It was a very simple implementation, composed of no more than 64 nodes, that I trained to recognize the patterns that I entered manually using an array of jumpers.
Sometime after starting the training, I noticed that the microcontroller began to heat up to the point of losing the serial connection with which I was monitoring it. My partner and I decided to try again with a small fan which, to our surprise, allowed the training to be completed. Against all odds, the experiment worked, the grade was good, and I passed Microcontrollers 2.
This was nowhere near one of the most impressive projects I did during my student days, but I always remember it as an important moment in my training as an engineer. It was the first time I could clearly see that software consumes power; A “for” can drain a battery and divert important energy resources. Nowadays it seems obvious, but I think we forget more often than we should.
