PLC-Course

Sprint 2 — Digital Foundations & Number Systems

Bolton chapters: 3–4 Time budget: 5–7 hours Core concept: PLCs think in bits — fluency in binary, octal, hex, and BCD is the price of admission to addressing memory, decoding I/O, and reading manufacturer documentation.

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🎯 Sprint Goals

• Convert fluently between denary (decimal), binary, octal, hex, and BCD
• Understand 1’s-complement and 2’s-complement representations of negative numbers
• Recognize bit, nibble, byte, word, and double-word in PLC data structures
• Read and predict the bit pattern of any I/O address on Siemens, Allen-Bradley, and Mitsubishi
• Explain when continuous I/O update is used vs. mass I/O copying

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📚 Bolton Reading

• Ch. 3 — Digital Systems (full)
• Ch. 4 — I/O Processing (second half: addressing, remote I/O)

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🗂️ Materials

• 📄 Cheat sheet
• 🧮 Workbook
• 🔢 Number Base Converter — runs in the browser, no install
• 🃏 Flashcards (in main flashcards bundle, tagged sprint-2)

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📋 Sprint Plan

Day 1 — Read Ch. 3. Drill conversions until 5 in a row are correct without error. Day 2 — Open the Number Base Converter. Set yourself a 5-minute, 20-conversion challenge. Day 3 — Read second half of Ch. 4. Map I/O addresses across three vendors. Day 4 — Workbook: implement two’s-complement subtraction by hand, then verify with code. Day 5 — Flashcards. Reflection in your sprint Issue.

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✅ Definition of Done

• Bolton Ch. 3 + 4 read
• Workbook completed (all conversions verified)
• Beat the speed-drill: 20 conversions in under 5 minutes
• Mapped 5 example I/O addresses across Siemens / Allen-Bradley / Mitsubishi
• Flashcards reviewed
• Sprint Issue updated

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