Physics307L:People/Carrillo/Oscilloscope
SJK 11:05, 29 September 2010 (EDT)
Your summary here is good. It's OK that you didn't get too far with the fall time and AC coupling is tricky. In future labs, reporting measurements along with statistical uncertainty will be critical. I see you discussing that here, even though you didn't obtain statistical uncertainty. That's good. As semester goes on, we'll learn how to do that.
Purpose
- Learn how to use the oscilloscope and function generator
- Understand what AC and DC coupling is and the difference between them
- Learn how to use our lab notebook and learn from our mistakes
- Understand what Triggering is
Summary
I connected the funtion generator to the oscilloscope, and used it to generate a sine wave in the ocilloscope. I set the generator to 200Hz, and measured the voltage using grid, cursor, and the measure function from the oscilloscope. AC coupling gave me the hardest time out of the whole lab and unfortunately I used up too much time trying to understand what it was and what its difference from the DC coupling is.
Fall Time
- I measured the fall time to be 117.8ms with the measure function. I feel like this is too high, I must have done something wrong
- If I would've had more time I would've used the fall time to measure the RC constant
- Use the equation at this link here to find the RC constant
Error
- I did not have a chance to look up the error in the measurements of the oscilloscope. I worked more on getting more comfortable with the oscilloscope and function generator. For future labs, I will make sure that I include the error.
Conclusion
Although I did not make as many measurements as needed, I learned a lot from this lab and how this class is going to be. I learned how to use an oscillocope and function generator, and now understand the difference between AC and DC coupling. I also learned how to determine the fall time of an oscilloscope. I read through a lot of the wiki links to understand a lot of the concepts in this lab and the article on triggering did not help at all.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the lab TA, Katie Richardson for helping me with AC/DC coupling, and also Professor Koch for helping out with the oscilloscope lab procedure
