Majority Vote Project
In this project, my classmates and I had a problem where 4 members were voting on a committee board. There are the President, Vice-President, Secretary, and Treasurer positions. Each position gets to vote once on any single proposed issue. A person can choose to vote or not vote in favor of the proposed issue, but the majority of votes wins. A tie is available though, if two people vote yes and two vote no and the vote is equal. If this is the case, then the tie is decided by whatever the President voted for. Our classes goal was to design and build a circuit that would simulate the voting of this committee.
Problem COnception
The purpose of the truth table is to show what different sets of inputs will make the circuit turn on. If the circuit is able to follow these inputs and turn on, the circuit is successfully completed. The number of rows and columns for the truth table is related to how many variables there are. The equation for the amount of rows is equal to 2^(# of inputs). The truth table represents voting ties by only displaying the paths that work with the presidents vote.
Unsimplified Circuit
Boolean Algebra Simplification
The boolean algebra was the most confusing part for me, but eventually I was able to come to a conclusion.
Simplified Circuit
The simplified circuit only requires 5 AND gates and 3 OR gates, which means you only need 2 AND chips and 1 OR chip. This form is much more efficient than the uns-implified circuit as that one takes many more gates and chips to create. It also makes the assembly a lot more confusing with the un-simplified version than the simplified version. Troubleshooting is also much easier with the less parts.
Bill of Materials
My bill of materials includes everything you need to create one of these majority vote circuits.
Conclusions
Overall, I learned a lot from this project. This project helped me understand the basics of circuitry and electrical connections, since we had to do it all of it on our own from scratch. This process shows the process of a circuit being created from a problem statement. This process is fairly simple - its just setting up a basic truth table and finding the minterms of the circuit. Then, just simplify the statement. Boolean algebra is extremely useful for our purposes, because it is very simple for electronics and can be simplified a lot.