News

4/28/2012

Teaching analog electronics? Need a lab curriculum? Here's some material that might be useful.

The lab is based on 'Mechbot', an all-analog circuit mobile robot. The robot is wired to engage in a sumo wrestling competition, to attempt to push their opponent out of a ring. Students purchase an inexpensive kit of parts and then progressively develop and test the robot circuitry until they have a completely functional sumo robot. The photo above shows the Mechbot chassis. Students added circuit to the protoboard.

We originally developed the analog electronics lab material for third year mechanical engineering students. The lab was very effective in engaging student interest and enthusiasm for the material. And the final sumo competition was great fun.

The lab instructional material is available <mechbot-lab-manual.pdf>.
Additional photographs and project notes are here <photos-and-notes.zip>.

We did this work in a university lab equipped with the usual instruments - meters, power supplies and scopes. Students would have liked better access to test equipment, so that they could work on their project outside of scheduled lab times.

These days, students could use a Syscomp CircuitGear oscilloscope-generator and an inexpensive wall-wart DC power supply to do much of the development and testing on their own. This takes pressure off the university labs and improves the skill-level of the students in operating electronic equipment.

Questions about Mechbot? Contact support@syscompdesign.com. We'll be glad to answer them.

4/28/2012

Did you know you can run several Syscomp instruments, simultaneously, on the same computer? Each one gets its own user space and its own serial port. Our software, or your own custom software, can talk to each instrument individually. The photo below is a screen shot of three instances of the CGR-101 operating at the same time. You could also 'mix and match' with different instruments operating at the same time.

4/16/2012

A new version of the CircuitGear CGR-101 software has been released. Version 19 of the software provides serval bug fixes, improves the automated RMS measurements, adds PNG screen capture, and greatly enhances the functionality of the network analyzer. Visit the download page to get the software.

2/13/2012

Larry Janus of Tube Equipment Corporation has sent us images of a custom graphical user interface he developed for the Syscomp CircuitGear CGR-101.

Larry is using the CGR-101 and this custom software to plot the amplitude and phase vs frequency response of audio transformers. He is also using the digital outputs of the CGR-101 to drive reed relays that connect various terminating resistors to the transformer under test. The graphical user interface is written in the LabVIEW programming language.

The GUI runs on a touch-screen equipped tablet, which eliminates the requirement for a mouse. In addition to LabVIEW, we have heard of custom CGR-101 software being built with Tcl/Tk, Visual Basic, C++ and C# (C Sharp). Any language that can talk to a serial port will work.

1/27/2012

Two articles have been added to the Application Notes section. The first article examines the usefulness of the single-shot trigger feature on the CGR-101 CircuitGear in examining power sequencing in a bridge driver circuit. The second article discusses how to use the temperature measurement features of the DVM-101 Multimeter to examine the performance of a temperature sensor in a power supply heat sink assembly.