This workshop is intended to introduce attendees to the low-level components used in the design of computer hardware, allowing them to experiment with the hardware-software interface. Attendees explore hands-on experiments that are designed for students unlikely to encounter hardware topics in their course of study. These experiments are offered in bridge courses of a graduate program enrolling students without a Computer Science background at Northeastern University (the Align MSCS Program). The workshop consists of three independent one-hour sessions.

During session 1, attendees use breadboards, power supplies, transistors, resistors, integrated circuits (logic gates), and light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to construct digital circuits. Transistors and resistors are used to design logic gates; then logic gates are used to design an arithmetic circuit (Half Adder); finally two Half Adders with an OR gate are cascaded to build a larger adder.

During session 2, attendees explore the interface between hardware and software, making software concepts tangible. Changing a bit from 0 to 1 in software causes a voltage change on a pin, causing an LED to light. Operations executed on a Pico microcontroller illustrate programming concepts like ASCII representation and data structures. Additional Python constructs enable the implementation of counters and games.

During session 3, attendees focus on C. The instructor walks through C implementations on Raspberry Pi (RSPi) and demonstrates how C programs enable hardware components by activating the hardware I/O ports of RSPi. Tutorials (hands on) include writing C code to realize Linked list, Tree and Graph implementations.