Today in class we had a lecture on voltage, current, energy and work. Oscar explained them in both physics and math backgrounds. It was a nice review for me and reminded me some key points that I always assumed in the past. For example, voltage needs a reference "0" level. We also learned that all kinds of forces and fields all work similarly like the electric forces and fields. I thought that was interesting and wondered how that would apply.
After laying out the background knowledge, we went directly to deal with a machine called Four Channel Digital Storage Oscilloscope, which we helped set up at the beginning of the class. This machine has a cord connected to it. When we touched the other end of the cord, the screen displayed a wave. We used the features in the machine to read the wave's frequency. Our group got 60.98 Hz, which is roughly right about the frequency we are supposed to get, which is 60 Hz, the frequency in the environment around us. I thought that was a little abstract but interesting. Then we did more cool things with the oscilloscope, such as one hand touching the end of the cord, the other hand touching other objects such as another person or other cords, power sources, and witnessed the increase in the magnitude of the waves.
Last we downloaded a program called LTspice. We opened different samples of circuits and ran the "running man" (a feature of the program) to test the voltage or current throughout the circuits. The voltage or current are shown on a graph. Our group opened a file called butter and it was apparently a butter filter used to block some undesired frequencies while preserve the desired ones. I hope to learn more about the meaning of the voltage/current graphs.
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