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23. Group Assignment Week 6 - Electronics Design

This week we are working on Electronics Design individually as well as in group. The following was the group assignment.

Group Assignment:

  • Use the test equipment in your lab to observe the operation of a microcontroller circuit board

Group Members:

Test Equipments in Lab

  1. Multimeters
  2. CRO

Testing with Multimeters

For the testing of Board using Multimeter. We can perform two main tasks mainly checking wether the connections are present or not using a continuity test and checking for presence of signal using DC values. There are other things we can do using multimeter that are mainly to check component values. While current can also be measured using multimeter, for low power applications such as a Helloworld board, it is not that important and feasible to connect the meter in series. We could however check the total current drawn by connecting the meter in series at the source.

For the current scenerio, we used the multimeter to check for component values mainly resistance and capacitance as example.

Then we proceeded to measure the source and other signal voltages using a multimeter.

Testing with CRO

Multimeter are good at measuring DC voltages however are not particularly effective and useful at measuring signal voltages that are pulse in nature with high frequency. Therefore, We make use of CRO to check the pulse volatages on the board. We used it to look at the frequency generated by the crystal oscillator.

Then we measured the pulse output generated when switchig the LED On and Off. This way we can visuallize the operation of the circuit board when switching an LED.

VIDEOS

Video showing the measurement of Pulse Output from the Controller on CRO.