Week 13 · Monday, November 30, 2026 · Room D-221
One day, two proofs.
Today asks for the two kinds of proof an engineer owes: on paper, that you understand the system you built, and on the bench, that your method survives a squeezed week. The final examination comes first; D3's rung, chosen tiny on purpose back in the studio, comes after. Neither is a surprise. The exam covers a course whose every page you still have, and the rung was sized for exactly this day. This hub is the review: the whole system told as one story, every equation on one page, the post-midterm misconception clinic, and the craft of the day itself.
What happens today
In the course outline
Two grades land today. The final examination (15 %): coverage, format and rules per the Fall 2026 course outline on Omnivox and the announcement that comes with the paper; this hub's review follows the course's own arc and claims nothing the outline does not. Deliverable D3 (5 %), per the brief: the skeleton plus exactly one thickness, old rungs still green behind it. The milestones page carries D3's three faces; this hub's D3 page carries the day's craft.
What this hub reviews
The course already has a review hub: Week 7 rebuilt Weeks 1 to 6 for the midterm, and its misconception clinic and master library have not expired; foundations questions still live there. This hub does for the arc since the midterm what Week 7 did before it: Weeks 8 to 12, the ESP32 and analog sensing, MQTT, control, Flask and the dashboard, and the build-week method. The two hubs together cover the course; the review page turns them into a circuit you can run in the days you have.
What you will be able to do by the end of the week
- Narrate the whole system from photon to pixel, naming what happens at every hop and the number that governs it.
- State, apply and defend each of the semester's equations, from the LED current to the PID law to ⌈log₂ n⌉.
- Catch yourself holding any of the post-midterm misconceptions, because you have met each one stated plainly.
- Work a paper exam with the Week 7 craft: whole paper first, points-to-minutes budget, attempts everywhere.
- Switch modes after the paper and land D3's rung: demonstrated, tagged, old rungs green behind it.
Twelve terms the exam leans on
Not new vocabulary: the twelve the arc since the midterm leans hardest on, each linked to its home. If any definition does not come instantly, that link is tonight's first stop.
| Term | In one line | Home |
|---|---|---|
| quantization | A 12-bit ADC maps a continuous voltage onto 4096 discrete levels; resolution is the step between them | W8 |
| duty cycle | The fraction of each PWM period spent high; what "brightness" means to a pin that only knows on and off | W8 |
| publish / subscribe | Senders and receivers meet only at named topics on a broker, decoupled in space and time | W9 |
| retained message | The one message per topic the broker hands to late subscribers; the last, not the history | W9 |
| QoS | Delivery promise per message: 0 at most once, 1 at least once (duplicates possible), 2 exactly once, at rising cost | W9 |
| last will | The message the broker publishes for a client that vanishes without a goodbye; how status topics stay honest | W9 |
| setpoint / PV / error | Want, have, and the difference the controller works to close: e = SP − PV | W10 |
| steady-state error | The error P-only control settles at; shrinks with gain, dies only by integral action | W10 |
| anti-windup | Stopping the integral from accumulating while the actuator is saturated, so recovery is not paid for later | W10 |
| bind address | Which interfaces a server listens on: 127.0.0.1 is loopback-only, 0.0.0.0 is every interface | W11 |
| walking skeleton | The thinnest end-to-end slice through every component, built first to flush the interface risks | W12 |
| half-splitting | Probe the middle, discard half the suspects, repeat: ⌈log₂ n⌉ probes to one faulty segment | W12 |
Where this fits in the course
Week 12 · Nov 23
Project studio: the system comes together
The studio where D2's skeleton walked and this week's rung was deliberately sized small.
Week 13 · Nov 30 · this hub
Final examination & D3
The review for the post-midterm arc, the exam, and the rung after: two proofs, one afternoon.
Week 14 · Dec 7
D4 build week: the table turns green
15 %, the project's biggest single grade: the build week where the ranked rungs land and the verification table fills with green.
Working at home
The week before this class splits two ways, and the split was decided in the studio: exam review in short, spaced sessions (the review page gives the circuit and the reasons it beats one long night), and D3's rung landed early in the week, so the days before the exam owe the project nothing. One warning the data supports: the night before serves consolidation, not acquisition. Run the clinic and one practice circuit, verify the rung one last time end to end, pack the Week 7 exam kit, and stop.