Majority Vote Machine

Purpose

The purpose of this project was to create a voting machine while only using AND, OR, and inverter logic gates. This circuit needed to follow the parameters set, and accomplish the overall goal which was to determine the outcome of votes by 4 inputs.

Procedure

1) First we created a truth table

2) Next we wrote the simplified logic expression

3) Then we designed an simplified logic circuit in our EN

4) We then designed the simplified logic circuit in Multisim.

Unsimplified Logic Design

Here we started by writing out the truth table for the Voting Machine. We then wrote the unsimplified logic expression out, and hand drew a logic circuit in out notebooks.

Unsimplified Logic Simulation

In this step we created our previously designed circuit in Multisim.

Simplied Logic Design

Went through the steps of simplification and couldn't figure it out, so I had to look at the key to simplify it.

Simplified Logic Simulation

Here, we took the simplified logic expression and created it in Multisim. It was much easier and shorter than the original circuit.

Simplified Circuit Breadboarding

During the process, we wired up power and ground, the gates, and the LED. We used the simplified design we came up with.

Conclusion (Letter to Grandma)

Dear Grandma,

I was recently selected to be one of the people on a team to design a voting machine that would accurately count people's votes. This came about after the United States 2000 Presidential Election. People became tired of the discrepancies of hand counting votes as it was extremely unreliable because votes went uncounted, or were counted multiple times.

For this process, my team and I began by designing how we would lay out the machine. The machine would count the votes of the president, vice-president, secretary, and treasurer, to ultimately decide the pass/fail of the vote. For a decision to pass, a majority of the board members must vote yes. In the event of a tie, the president’s vote is used to break the tie. For a tie, if the president votes yes, the decision passes. If the president votes no, the decision fails. We designed a table which contained with all of the possible outcomes from the given variables. From there we designed the very basics of the circuit using all of the outcomes that passed a vote. From there, we went into a Digital Circuit Simulator and re-created the circuit we had designed. Because this circuit was so complicated, we had to take some time to fix some of the errors we had encountered during the designing process. After simulating and testing that circuit, we used Boolean algebra to simplify the outcomes of the original circuit to a shorter, more simple circuit. This means the circuit would be less complicated, and use less materials to make. This is crucial to the process of designing circuits because it makes them much shorter and easier to work with. It can also lower the costs of the goods that are being made. Next, we drew the simplified circuit in our notebooks. Then, we went back into our circuit simulator and re-created the simplified circuit. Once we were done re-creating the simplified system, we had to work out some simple problems we had encountered during the design phase. That marked the last part of the design phase of our project, and we moved on to the building phase.

In the building phase, we built the circuit that we designed with physical wires and components. We started with the base which is called a breadboard. A breadboard is what makes circuits possible. They are what you plug your wires into and they connect certain components under the surface. This allows for the interaction of components, especially AND and OR gates (which are how the votes are decided.) We started by wiring up the power and the ground. These are what allow the components interact. Then we began to create the outcomes using the gates we had based on how we had designed it in the simplified circuit. From there we began to test the circuit we had created, and began to de-bug, which is where we test where things are going wrong and fix them. Finally we had finished our breadboard (or the voting machine)!

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