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Team Status Report for April 29

At this point, our project is essentially completed as we have our experiments finalized and integration has been tested. There is no major risk that could jeopardize the completion of our project.

No changes were made to the design or schedule for our project.

Validation and Verification

  1. We first tested the accuracy of our voltage readings. We did that by comparing the maximum peak to peak voltage recorded in Scopy to the voltages recorded on the web app via the ADALM. We were within our passing criteria of a maximum 3% error rate. This was expected as the ADALM oscilloscopes are very accurate themselves.
  2. To ensure low latency for the web app animation update when we make a change to the physical circuit, we timed the time between when the crank is first turned to when the web app updates its graph, and we were within our passing criteria of a maximum 1 second latency. We therefore, did not need to change our design after this test either.
  3. To test the repeatability and reusability, we wanted to ensure the circuits last for around a 1000 attempts (any physical change made to the circuit). We tested that with the help of a power drill running continuously for around 1.5 to 2 minutes as shown in the final presentation. That helped ensure our experiment could last for long periods of repeated usage. For the Ampere’s law experiment, we essentially used the ADALM signal generator to produce an AC signal for the solenoid that would continuously deflect the compass to ensure it lasted for many rounds of battery polarity changes. Both the experiments passed the tests, ensuring our design is robust.
  4. Rotated magnets in the Faraday’s law experiment by hand and used an oscilloscope to measure the induced emf. A Vpp of 4.54 V was achieved at 6.65 Hz, which is higher than the turn on voltage of an LED. The induced emf was able to turn on two red LEDs in series, and a red and a blue LED in parallel.
  5. Measured the current through the Ampere’s law experiment to be around 2 A. The induced magnetic field strength is approximated to be 5.7 mT with Ampere’s law, which was able to deflect the needle of the compass significantly (~180 degrees).
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Mudit’s Status Report for April 29

This week I worked on rehearsals for the final presentation, completing the poster that is due next week and drawing up designs for the Ampere-Maxwell Experiment Box similar to the one for the Faraday’s Experiment. I also worked with Aaron on testing the voltage readings from the Amp-Max Experiment as recorded on the web app via the ADALM.

My progress is on schedule and in the next week, I’ll mostly be working on the Final Report and making the Video submission for the project, while assisting Shizhen in printing and finalizing the Ampere-Maxwell Box.

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Mudit’s Status Report for April 22

Over the past two weeks, I worked on confirming the design for the Ampere-Maxwell Experiment and buying the required items like galvanometer. I also developed the EM web app educational content for the Basic and Advanced levels, as well as the quiz questions for those two levels. This week I mostly worked on building the final presentation deck that I will be presenting next week.

My progress is on schedule and in the next week, I will work with Shizhen on setting our experiment circuits in the cases for the final demo, while also beginning work on the poster and report.

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Team Status Report for April 8

Having completed our interim demo, we believe we are on track to achieve our desired end-result for the final presentation. The most significant risk now would be being unable to complete building our booth for the demo. This however, should be a relatively straightforward process as Shizhen has figured out the laser cutting process that we will use to build our display cases. We will start work on this in the next 2 weeks to have the booth ready by demo day. Another risk is failing to display the oscilloscope plots in the web application seamlessly. Right now the user experience with the animated plots is not ideal as sometimes the plot can fail to display and the plot lacks interactivity. To mitigate the risk, we will attempt other methods to display the plots, such as using Scopy, if the problem cannot be solved.

No changes have been made to the design of our system and our schedule remains the same.

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Mudit’s Status Report for April 8

This week I primarily focused on preparing for the demo. This included ensuring the Ampere-Maxwell Experiment worked with the sautered switches that I did over the weekend. I spent a majority of my week coming up with the Educational E&M Content for the Web App for the Advanced level of users (Basic, Intermediate, Advanced levels). I also sourced the illustrations that were required for the web app content and the quizzes that we will have for the users.

I am currently on track according to the schedule. In the next week, I will complete the content for the basic level and possibly the intermediate levels as well.

With regards to testing, for the web app educational content, we plan to have Professor Maysam Chamanzar take a look at our modules as he teaches the fundamentals of Electromagnetics course at CMU. He will be able to better advise us on the accuracy and readability/understandability of the content.

For the testing of the Ampere-Maxwell Experiment, I can test that with a Square wave power supply via the ADALM to test the ability of the solenoid to flip its magnetic field and have the compass deflect over multiple cycles (~100). This would test the durability of the experiment without me having to manually flip the switch repeatedly.

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Mudit’s Status Report for April 1

This week I worked with Shizhen on examining the ADALM as a possible alternative to arduino for the Hardware Bridge section of the project. I found resources for running scripts on Scopy to automate the oscilloscope readings from Scopy. The main issue I was stuck at with Shizhen was figuring out how to get these oscilloscope values transferred into a CSV file that could be read by the web app. There is not much documentation on scripting with the ADALM but we were lucky to find some reference code on the ADALM support page that helped us to solve the issue.

Other than that, I worked on building the updated Gantt Chart for the last 4 weeks of our project. Based on our weekly meeting, I decided to not solder the Ampere-maxwell experiment so that we can make maintenance easier. I will instead be using female to female jumper wires and crocodile clips for the connections instead, and will order those components this week.

In the next week, we will present our interim demo and I will be working on the E&M content for the web app for the highest difficulty level (engineering students with strong mathematical background).

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Team Status Report for March 25

As we prepare for the interim demo next week, the plan is to have circuits for the two experiments finalized, and the shell of the web app completed (this would not include the content of the web app, which can be easily added in the week after once the ability to create modules and add images has been finalized for the interim demo).

The most significant risk to our project at this stage would be to not reach the interim demo deadline. We managed this risk by having the demo circuits (on breadboards) already made in case there are issues with soldered circuits. The web app is largely complete with functionality and ready for integration with the circuits.

No changes have been made to the schedule or the design of the system.

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Mudit’s Status Report for March 25

This week I participated in the ethics discussion with other groups and we considered the importance of accessibility of our educational content in the web app. Since our audience can range from from pre-university students to Engineers with a mathematical background, we considered implementing modules of different complexity levels to cater to all of our audiences. This would mean more qualitative explanations of EM to pre-university students and a more mathematical treatment of EM for Engineering students. For the Ampere-Maxwell experiment, I started soldering components to create the experiment set-up. One of the solenoids we purchased seems to have lost its wire connections and no longer conducts, so I have replaced that with a smaller solenoid that is working. Once the soldering is done, the components should remain intact easily as they would not be frequently disconnected.

The progress is on schedule and by next weekend I should have the experiment set-up made in time for the interim demo.

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Team Status Report for March 18

Currently, our most significant risk would be the integration of the induced voltage measurements into our database. In the upcoming weeks, we will be working on getting the Arduino data into our web application under the specified latency limit. We have tested the Arduino sample gathering timing, which appears to be under 1 ms per sample. The remaining part of the latency would be to send the data to a SQLite database and have our web app gather that data from the database itself.

As of now, no changes have been made to our existing design of the system and the schedule remains intact. In the following 2 weeks, we will finalize our experiments by soldering them such that they are ready to be presented in the booth. By then, the web app framework will also be prepared such that we can start adding content to it in the following weeks.

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Mudit’s Status Report for March 18

This week I worked on the ethics considerations for our project. This included doing the readings, answering the questions and the reflections on how our project can impact public safety, among other ethical considerations. I followed that up by building a mock circuit of the ampere-maxwell experiment with the ordered components on a breadboard. The circuit worked with the SPDT switch and the solenoid we purchased, as shown below.

Circuit On
Circuit Off

My progress is on schedule and in the next 2 weeks, I plan to finalize my experiment design by soldering the components together such that the experiment is ready to be placed in the booth.