This project supports the Electronic Instrumentation course of the Scientific Instrumentation Option program available to physics majors. The course consists of one lecture and six hours of laboratory per week. The revised course focuses on data acquisition and manipulation. The intent of this course is to produce a senior or graduate-level student who can walk into almost any science laboratory, determine the sensor and microcomputer needs for the laboratory, connect the various sensors and cards to the computer, write simple software to perform the data acquisition task, and then analyze the resulting data knowledgeably to minimize the effects of noise or transducer nonlinearities. This course is taught concurrently with a semester lecture course on Fourier transforms, Laplace transforms, Z transforms, and their applications. This project specifically funds the purchase of equipment for the laboratory in support of this course revision: 10 IBM-compatible PC workstations with I/O cards, Ethernet Linkage, and a large variety of sensors.
