Introducing programmable logic devices in physics laboratories: a practical guide for the implementation of experiments

Abstract

Modern electronic instrumentation techniques are being introduced in the programs of the Physics and Physical Engineering courses and, in this context, the programmable logic devices play an important role. We present the fundamental steps for the design, development, and validation of systems based on programmable logic devices. Two digital filters have been implemented for illustrating the guide procedures. The results show that the function-response complies with the common requirements of generic filter performance. This work is targeted at students and lectures and aims stimulate and challenge them to develop electronic instrumentation using programmable logic devices in teaching activities.

Construction of a didactic system for wave propagation speed determination in liquids

“…Figure 9 shows the image file captured from the oscilloscope screen with the following signals: emitter circuit (drain of MOSFET, orange line), receiver circuit (VoR, blue line) and logic conversion covering the travel time (to FPGA, purple line). While the former signal is high, a counter implemented in a FPGA (a board with on Cyclone IV FPGA (ep4ce6) and a 50 MHz crystal oscillator clock [13]), performs the counting of clock cycles every 20 ns. The VHDL code implemented in the FPGA is found in https://github.com/RoosenRunge/ SoundSpeedLiquidSystem .…”

Analyzing Atmospheric Pressure Variations in Time and Height: a Didactic Proposal Employing a Smartphone Barometer

“…The use of technological resources in physics teaching and other disciplines occupies an ever-increasing important space in education, especially in laboratory practices. Their use started about 30 years ago with the introduction of computers in laboratory educational practices [1,2] and, more recently, with the popularization of electronic platforms such as Arduino [3][4][5][6], programmable logic devices [7], and microcontrollers [8][9][10]. Currently, familiarity and access to smartphones are the main contributing factors for their educational use in physics laboratories, mainly due to the possibility of installing applications (many free) that allow to instrumentalize the device and render it useful for teaching, as can be verified in many physics topics [11][12][13][14][15][16].…”