PHYS 3180: Intermediate Laboratory
Dr. S. Cheng
In this course, students are introduced to basic electronics that form a starting point to measure physical quantities and to interface to computers for data acquisition, analysis, and control. The emphasis is on the hardware side, while students are encouraged to engage in software self learning to enhance the computer interface and control.
Instead of systematically learning electronics theories, this course will rather base on modular introduction of commonly used electronics and theories associated with them to emphasize the practical usages. Because of this, there is no required textbook for this course. We will learn how to collect needed materials and information through internet and lay down a good foundation of self learning. A good reference book is ¡°The Art of Electronics¡± by Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill that gives you not only theories and applications, but also advices of to-do and not-to-do that can only come with many years of real experiences in electronics designs.
Keep a good laboratory notes with neat schematics. Collect data sheets for references that might be useful in the future. Learning electronics cannot be achieved with one semester introductory course but a lifetime long hobby and devotion. Have a USB thumb drive around you to copy and share free software to facilitate the exchange of ideas and designs. If you would like to submit homework by email, everything has to be zipped before you send it.
For the first day in class:
Please bring a USB thumb drive with you to copy a large amount files with you. Those files include a series of Electronics books in PDF file format, tutorial materials on C-programming and other programming languages, circuit drawing software, circuit simulation software and so on. All those files are freely downloaded from the internet.
If I have some news or additional information that I would like to pass to you, I will use this web site for that purpose. So keep a link to this web site for your convenience.
The syllabus for this class is here.