6. Electronics Design- Noah, Elle¶
The group work for this week was to observe the operation of a microcontroller
Work Distribution¶
- Both: Testing Multimeter, Oscilloscope, Logic Analyzer
- Noah: Microcontroller Setup, Multimeter Writing, Oscilloscope Writing
- Elle: Waveforms Software Setup, Logic Analyzer Writing
Multimeter¶
What is it?¶
A multimeter is the most basic but useful tool for testing circuits. As seen on ours, it supports reading voltage, amperage, resistance, among other useful tools like continuity (could power flow through this) and testing diodes (which way does the power flow through this).
How to set it up¶
In our lab, and probably for you, it is already pre set up. The only thing you need to do to get it ready is to switch its dial to what your reading, with the only obscure parts of it being the greek symbol omega being resistance in ohms, and the sound wave/wifi symbol looking thing usally being continuity
How to use it?¶
Multimeters are also very simple to use, just requiring the ground probe (usally black) to be connected to ground somewhere and the red probe connected to where you want to see voltage. For resistance, you just measure on the two sides of the resistor, and for current, you break the circuit and let the power flow through. By testing the voltage of an LED being dimmed and brightened by PWM, we were able to see crudely how the voltage was decreasing and increasing. for a deeper understanding, a multimeter is not good, and a oscilloscope or logic analyizer is advised
Oscilloscope¶
What is it?¶
The oscilloscope is next to a logic analyzer as the strongest tool for understanding a circuit in our lab. Unlike a multimeter, which only gives static readings, an oscilloscope allows us to visualize how signals change over time. It displays voltage as the vertical component, and time as the horizontal, making it invaluable for analyzing, debugging, and measuring precise timing characteristics in a circuit. Using an oscilloscope, we could observe the shape, frequency, and amplitude of signals. This is especially useful for understanding PWM signals, clock pulses, and simple communication protocols like SPI or I2C.
How to set it up?¶
Setting up the oscilloscope is complicated on the first run. The main things we had to do were find the wires/probe for it, which was stored in an entirely different room. After that, Andrew Puky, who had worked with the oscilloscope a day before helped guide us through setting it up. Essentially, we had to plug the probe into channel one, select channel one, and then change the window size intil our graph fit neatly in there
How to use it?¶
By Connecting to ground with the clamp, and the the output of a PWM-controlled LED with the probe, we were able to see the actual waveform instead of just a fluctuating voltage value, showing clearly how the signal switches between high and low states. Oscilloscopes have multiple settings for adjusting the time scale, voltage range, and triggering, allowing us to capture specific moments in a signal. They can also measure properties like duty cycle, rise time, and signal noise, making them essential for diagnosing circuit issues past some part of it not having power.
Logic Analyzer¶
What is it?¶
An analog analyzer is a device that measures and analyzes continuous (analog) signals, such as sound, voltage, or radio waves, to assess their properties like frequency, amplitude, and distortion.
How to set up¶
To set up the analog analyzer, we used a siple circuit would use PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) pins in order to pulse an LED. Once that was created we down loaded the WaveForms. Once this was downloaded we worked with Andrew Puky to figure it out. While trying to figure it out we need to try many different things.
Our first problem was for some reason some softwares don’t work on Noah’s computer, therefore we had to switch to mine. We noticed it wasn’t working with Noah’s when we tried to plug in the analog discovery it said there was no board found and only and demo one came up. After we switched over to my computer that worked perfectly.
Once the board was connected, we used “Scope”. Scope is a way to get what the oscilloscope looked like but online through the discovery2 (that is the device we were using name).
After that it took me to a page that looked like the imgae below. This is where you can control the display. The first part was understanding the side panel. When wiring the Discovery2, we used +1 and -1 wires which were the very first ones. As you can see the first channel is already set to +-1 which means that it would be reading through the wores we chose. If we had a 2nd circuit we would used a second channel but for us we didn’t need that so we just unselected that. Then the next step was the time (the box above channel one). This controlled the speed of the scope. The less time the closer to hours, the closer together the sections are. You want to set the time to a good number where you can tel and read what is happening. THen after that, the next step was to click start and watch it.
