For the group assignment, I didn’t have a proper place to carry out the activity, so I contacted a friend, Omar, who had the necessary equipment at his house. He has been helping me with some of the equipment he owns and with key concepts to better understand electronics. This helped me a lot, as he had the equipment required for the assignment, which allowed me to see its utility and gain a clearer understanding of various aspects of electronics.
I currently work at Fab Lab iFurniture as a Fab Manager, so whenever we have visitors or organize training sessions, I am responsible for leading this workshop on risk prevention and workplace safety. For this reason, I have organized a group invitation to my colleagues from Fab Academy to participate in this workshop.
What is displayed on the screen is the result of configuring the LED to trigger every 0.1 seconds. Each pulse or square on the screen represents 100 millivolts. In my LED, the voltage is 200 millivolts, so each square represents 50 milliseconds. In practice, I have 2 squares, which equal 100 milliseconds.
In the signal analysis, the Pk-Pk (peak-to-peak) value I obtained is 212.00 mV. The sampling rate is 20.0 MSa/s (million samples per second), with a memory depth of 14.0 Mpts (million points per channel). This indicates that the oscilloscope is sampling at a high rate and has sufficient memory capacity to capture complex and high-resolution signals.
For this exercise, the microcontroller must be connected to a power source in order to use the oscilloscope. This is necessary because the oscilloscope measures the electrical signals generated by the microcontroller, and it needs the microcontroller to be active and functioning in order to obtain accurate readings.
Now I will use the multimeter to measure the resistance. For this, the component must be disconnected from the power source to make an accurate measurement. The reading obtained in ohms is 217.07 Ω.
To measure the LED, it must be connected to a power source. Then, we perform the same process with the multimeter, and the reading obtained was 0.94 V. This value corresponds to the voltage drop across the LED when it is operating. The LED typically has a voltage drop that varies depending on its type and color. In this case, the 0.94 V reading indicates that the LED is functioning correctly within the expected range, as the typical voltage drop of common LEDs is usually between 1.8 V and 3.2 V, depending on the type of LED.
For this task, I used my personal oscilloscope, since the UNCP Fab Lab where I work doesn't currently have this testing instrument. So, I made the most of this instrument, as it's a PC oscilloscope with a good bandwidth (20 MHz). The software is intuitive. In addition, it allowed me to better understand the concepts of measuring different signals. This measuring instrument is very similar to a bench oscilloscope.
The Hantek oscilloscope has 8 channels for performing various tests. It features over 80 types of diagnostic functions, and a video help function: it provides video help for diagnostics, which can be viewed online. Diagnostic results can be generated as a report, printed, or taken as screenshots with the touch of a button.
On the home screen there are three diagnostic functions, oscilloscope and signal generator.
The first step is to turn on the oscilloscope and, by default, observe the functions of 08 channels. To perform the tests, we will deactivate 07 channels, leaving only channel 01 for testing on the XIAO ESP 32C3 microcontroller.
On the screen connected to the Hantek oscilloscope, you can see the measurement of the output signal on the LED diode connected to pin D10 and GND of the XIAO ESP32C3 microcontroller.
For the second measurement, we used the multimeter, which is a portable electrical instrument capable of directly measuring electrical magnitudes, such as voltage, resistance and current. In this case, I measured the 3v3 output voltage of the RP2040 zero card.
