Supplemental sheets, draft 3

This post updates and replaces the Supplemental sheets, draft 2. It reflects the redesign of the course based on running a prototype version of the course in as a group tutorial in Winter 2013.

Lecture Course

Undergraduate Supplemental Sheet
Information to accompany Request for Course Approval
Sponsoring Agency: Biomolecular Engineering
Course #: 101
Catalog Title: Applied Circuits for Bioengineers

Please answer all of the following questions using a separate sheet for your response.
1. Are you proposing a revision to an existing course? If so give the name, number, and GE designations (if applicable) currently held.

This is not a revision to any existing course.A prototype version of the course was run as BME 194 Group Tutorial in Winter 2013. Notes on the design and daily running of that prototype can be found at https://gasstationwithoutpumps.wordpress.com/circuits-course-table-of-contents

2. In concrete, substantive terms explain how the course will proceed. List the major topics to be covered, preferably by week.

The Applied Circuits course is centered around the labs in the accompanying lab course.  Concepts are taught as needed for the labs, with design and analysis exercises in the lecture course cementing the understanding. The recurring theme throughout the course is voltage dividers: for change of voltage, for current-to-voltage conversion, for high-pass and low-pass RC filters, in Wheatstone bridges, and as feedback circuits in op amp circuits.  The intent of this course is to provide substantial design experience for bioengineering students early in their studies, and to serve both as as bridge course to entice students into the bioelectronics concentration and as a terminal electronics course for those students focussing on other areas.

1. Basic DC circuit concept review: voltage current, resistance, Kirchhoff’s Laws, Ohm’s Law, voltage divider, notion of a transducer.
   The first week should cover all the concepts needed to do the thermistor lab successfully.
2. Models of thermistor resistance as a function of temperature. Voltage and current sources, AC vs DC, DC blocking by capacitors, RC time constant, complex numbers, sine waves, RMS voltage, phasors. The second week should cover all the concepts needed to do the electret microphone lab successfully.
3. Low-pass and high-pass RC filters as voltage dividers, Bode plots. Concepts necessary for properly understanding digitized signals: quantized time, quantized voltage, sampling frequency, Nyquist frequency, aliasing.
4. Amplifier basics: op amps, AC coupling, gain computation, DC bias for single-power-supply offsets, bias source with unity-gain amplifier.  In the lab, students will design, build, and test a low-gain amplifier (around 5–10 V/V) for audio signals from an electret microphone. We’ll also include a simple current-amplifier model of a bipolar transistor, so that they can increase the current capability of their amplfier.
5. Op amps with feedback that has complex impedance (frequency-dependent feedback), RC time constants, parallel capacitors, hysteresis, square-wave oscillator using Schmitt triggers, capacitance-output sensors, capacitance-to-frequency conversion.   Topics are selected to support students designing a capacitive touch sensor in the accompanying lab.
6. Phototransistors and FETs for the tinkering lab and for the class-D amplifier lab. In preparation for the lab in which students model a pair of electrodes as R+(C||R), we will need a variety of both electronics and electrochemistry concepts: variation of parameters with frequency, impedance of capacitors, magnitude of impedance, series and parallel circuits, limitations of R+(C||R) model, and at least a vague understanding of half-cell potentials for the electrode reactions: Ag → Ag⁺ + e^-, Ag⁺ + Cl^- → AgCl, Fe + 2 Cl^-→ FeCl₂ + 2 e^-.
7. Differential signals, twisted-pair wiring to reduce noise, strain gauge bridges, instrumentation amplifier, DC coupling, multi-stage amplifiers.
   Topics are selected to support the design of a 2-stage amplifier for a piezoresistive pressure sensor in the lab.
8. System design, comparators, more on FETs. Students will design a class-D power amplifier to implement in the lab.
9. A little electrophysiology: action potentials, electromyograms, electrocardiograms. Topics are chosen so that students can design a simple 3-wire electrocardiogram (EKG) in the lab.There will also be a bit more development of simple (single-pole) filters.
10. The last week will be review and special topics requested by the students.

3. Systemwide Senate Regulation 760 specifies that 1 academic credit corresponds to 3 hours of work per week for the student in a 10-week quarter. Please briefly explain how the course will lead to sufficient work with reference to e.g., lectures, sections, amount of homework, field trips, etc. [Please note that if significant changes are proposed to the format of the course after its initial approval, you will need to submit new course approval paperwork to answer this question in light of the new course format.]

The combination of BME101 and BME101L is 7 units (21 hours per week).  The time will be spent approximately as follows:

• 3.5 hours lecture/discussion
• 3.5 hours reading background and circuits text
• 3 hours read lab handouts and doing pre-lab design activities
• 6 hours lab
• 5 hours writing design reports for lab

4. Include a complete reading list or its equivalent in other media.

No existing book covers all the material.  For the prototype run of the course, we relied heavily on Wikipedia articles, which turned out to be too dense for many of the students.  Other alternatives (such as Op amps for everyone by Ron Mancini http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=1469 Chapters 1–6 and Op Amp Applications Handbook by Analog Devices http://www.analog.com/library/analogDialogue/archives/39-05/op_amp_applications_handbook.html Sections 1-1 and 1-4) were also much too advanced.

In future we will most likely use the free on-line text All about Circuits as the primary text, with material not covered there (such as the various sensors) coming mainly from Wikipedia and the datasheets for the components.

5. State the basis on which evaluation of individual students’ achievements in this course will be made by the instructor (e.g., class participation, examinations, papers, projects).

Students will be evaluated primarily on design reports with some in-class or take-home quizzes to ensure that they do the needed reading on theoretical concepts.

6. List other UCSC courses covering similar material, if known.

EE 101 covers some of the same circuit material, but without the focus on sensors and without instrumentation amps.  It covers linear circuit theory in much more depth and focuses on mathematical analysis of complicated linear circuits, rather than on design with simple circuits.  The expectation for bioengineering students is that those in the bioelectronics track would take BME 101 before taking EE101, and that those in other tracks would take BME 101 as a terminal electronics course providing substantial engineering design.  The extra material in BME 101 would prepare the bioengineering students better for EE 101.

Physics 160 offers a similar level of practical electronics, but focuses on physics applications, rather than on bioengineering applications, and is only offered in alternate years.

7. List expected resource requirements including course support and specialized facilities or equipment for divisional review. (This information must also be reported to the scheduling office each quarter the course is offered.)

The lecture part of the course needs no special equipment—a standard media-equipped classroom with a whiteboard, screen, and data projector should suffice. Having a portable laptop-connected oscilloscope would make demos much easier to do, but is not essential.

The lecture course is not really separable from the associated lab course,whose equipment needs are described on the supplemental sheet for that course.

The course requires a faculty member (simultaneously teaching the co-requisite Applied Circuits lab course) and a teaching assistant or undergraduate group tutor for discussion sections and assistance in grading.  The same TA/group tutor should be used for both the lecture and the lab courses.

8. If applicable, justify any pre-requisites or enrollment restrictions proposed for this course. For pre-requisites sponsored by other departments/programs, please provide evidence of consultation.

Students will be required to have single-variable calculus and a physics electricity and magnetism course. Both are standard prerequisites for any circuits course. Although DC circuits can be analyzed without calculus, differentiation and integration are fundamental to AC analysis. Students should have already been introduced to the ideas of capacitors and inductors and to serial and parallel circuits.

The prerequisite courses are already required courses for biology majors and bioengineering majors, so no additional impact on the courses is expected.

9. Proposals for new or revised Disciplinary Communication courses will be considered within the context of the approved DC plan for the relevant major(s). If applicable, please complete and submit the new proposal form (http://reg.ucsc.edu/forms/DC_statement_form.doc or http://reg.ucsc.edu/forms/DC_statement_form.pdf) or the revisions to approved plans form (http://reg.ucsc.edu/forms/DC_approval_revision.doc or http://reg.ucsc.edu/forms/DC_approval_revision.pdf).

This course is not expected to contribute to any major’s disciplinary communication requirement, though students will get extensive writing practice in the design reports (writing between 50 and 100 pages during the quarter).

10. If you are requesting a GE designation for the proposed course, please justify your request making reference to the attached guidelines.

No General Education code is proposed for this course, as all relevant codes will have already been satisfied by the prerequisites.

11. If this is a new course and you requesting a new GE, do you think an old GE designation(s) is also appropriate? (CEP would like to maintain as many old GE offerings as is possible for the time being.)

No General Education code is proposed for this course, as all relevant codes (old or new) will have already been satisfied by the prerequisites.

Lab course

Undergraduate Supplemental Sheet
Information to accompany Request for Course Approval
Sponsoring Agency Biomolecular Engineering
Course # 101L
Catalog Title Applied Circuits Lab

Please answer all of the following questions using a separate sheet for your response.
1. Are you proposing a revision to an existing course? If so give the name, number, and GE designations (if applicable) currently held.

This is not a revision to any existing course. A prototype version of the course was run as BME 194F Group Tutorial in Winter 2013. Notes on the design and daily running of that prototype can be found at https://gasstationwithoutpumps.wordpress.com/circuits-course-table-of-contents

2. In concrete, substantive terms explain how the course will proceed. List the major topics to be covered, preferably by week.

The course is a lab course paired with BME 101, Applied Circuits for Bioengineers.  The labs have been designed to be relevant to bioengineers and to have as much design as is feasible in a first circuits course.  The labs are the core of the course, with lecture/discussion classes to support them. There will be six hours of lab a week, split into 2 3-hour sessions. Lab assignments will generally take two lab sessions, with data collection in the first lab session, and data analysis and design between lab sessions.   Some of the more straightforward labs will need only a single session.  Except for the first intro lab, these labs have been used in the prototype run of the class as 3-hour labs.  Most did not fit in one 3-hour lab session and would benefit from being split into two separate lab sessions with data analysis and design between the sessions.

1. Intro to parts, tools, and lab equipment (single session)
2. Thermistor
3. Microphone
4. Sampling and aliasing (single session)
5. Audio amp
6. Hysteresis oscillator and soldering lab
7. FET and phototransistor
8. Electrode modeling
9. Pressure sensor and instrumentation amp (soldered)
10. Class-D power amplifier
11. EKG (instrumentation amp with filters, soldered)

1. Intro to parts, tools, and lab equipment
   Students will learn about the test equipment by having them use the multimeters to measure other multimeters. What is the resistance of a multimeter that is measuring voltage? of one that is measuring current? what current or voltage is used for the resistance measurement? Students will be  issued their parts and tool kits, learn to use the wire strippers and make twisted-wire cables for the power supplies to use all quarter.  They will learn to set the current limits on the power supplies and  measure voltages and currents for resistor loads around 500Ω.  This lab will not require a written lab report.
   Lab skills developed: wire strippers, multimeter for measuring voltage and current, setting bench power supply
   Equipment needed: multimeter, power supply
2. Thermistor lab
   The thermistor lab will have two lab sessions involving the use of a Vishay BC Components NTCLE413E2103F520L thermistor or equivalent.
For the first lab session, the students will use a bench multimeter to measure the resistance of the thermistor, dunking it in various water baths (with thermometers in them to measure the temperature). They should fit a simple curve to this data based on standard thermistor models. A class period will be spent on learning both the model and how to do model fitting with gnuplot, and there will be a between-lab exercise where they derive the formula for maximizing | dV/dT | in a voltage divider that converts the resistance to a voltage.
   For the scond lab session, they will add a series resistor to make a voltage divider. They have to choose a value to get as large and linear a voltage response as possible at some specified “most-interesting” temperature (perhaps body temperature, perhaps room temperature, perhaps DNA melting temperature).  They will then measure and plot the voltage output for another set of water baths. If they do it right, they should get a much more linear response than for their resistance measurements. 
Finally, they will hook up the voltage divider to an Arduino analog input and record a time series of a water bath cooling off (perhaps adding an ice cube to warm water to get a fast temperature change), and plot temperature as a function of time.
   Lab skills developed: use of multimeter for measuring resistance and voltage, use of Arduino with data-acquisition program to record a time series, fitting a model to data points, simple breadboarding.Equipment needed: multimeter, power supply, thermistor, selection of various resistors, breadboard, clip leads, thermoses for water baths, secondary containment tubs to avoid water spills in the electronics lab. Arduino boards will be part of the student-purchased lab kit. All uses of the Arduino board assume connection via USB cable to a desktop or laptop computer that has the data logger software that we will provide.
3. Electret microphone
   First, we will have the students measure and plot the DC current vs. voltage for the microphone. The microphone is normally operated with a 3V drop across it, but can stand up to 10V, so they should be able to set the Agilent E3631A  bench power supply to various values from 0V to 10V and get the voltage and current readings directly from the bench supply, which has 4-place accuracy for both voltage and current. Ideally, they should see that the current is nearly constant as voltage is varied—nothing like a resistor.  They will follow up the hand measurements with automated measurements using the Arduino to measure the voltage across the mic and current through it for voltages up to about 4v.  The FET in the microphone shows a typical exponential I vs. V characteristic below threshold, and a gradually increasing current as voltage increases in the saturation region.  We’ll do plotting and model fitting in the data analysis class between the two labs.
   Second, we will have them do current-to-voltage conversion with a 5v power supply and a resistor to get a 1.5v DC output from the microphone and hook up the output of the microphone to the input of the oscilloscope. Input can be whistling, talking, iPod earpiece, … . They should learn the difference between AC-coupled and DC-coupled inputs to the scope, and how to set the horizontal and vertical scales of the scope. They will also design and wire their own DC blocking RC filter (going down to about 1Hz), and confirm that it has a similar effect to the AC coupling on the scope. Fourth, they will play sine waves from the function generator through a loudspeaker next to the mic, observe the voltage output with the scope, and measure the AC voltage with a multimeter, perhaps plotting output voltage as a function of frequency. Note: the specs for the electret mic show a fairly flat response from 50Hz to 3kHz, so most of what the students will see here is the poor response of a cheap speaker at low frequencies.
   EE concepts: current sources, AC vs DC, DC blocking by capacitors, RC time constant, sine waves, RMS voltage, properties varying with frequency.Lab skills: power supply, oscilloscope, function generator, RMS AC voltage measurement.Equipment needed: multimeter, oscilloscope, function generator, power supply, electret microphone, small loudspeaker, selection of various resistors, breadboard, clip leads.
4. Sampling and Aliasing
   Students will use the data logger software on the Arduino to sample sine waves from a function generator at different sampling rates.  They will need to design a high-pass RC filter to shift the DC voltage from centered at 0 to centered at 2.5v in the middle of the Arduino A-to-D converter range.  They will also design a low-pass filter (with corner frequency below the Nyquist frequency) to see the effect of filtering on the aliasing.
   EE concepts: quantized time, quantized voltage, sampling frequency, Nyquist frequency, aliasing, RC filters.
   Equipment needed:  function generator, Arduino board, computer.
5. Audio amplifier
   Students will use an op amp to build a simple non-inverting audio amplifier for an electret microphone, setting the gain to around 6 or 7. The amplifier will need a a high-pass filter to provide DC level shifting at the input to the amplifier. Note that we are using single-power-supply op amps, so they will have to design a bias voltage supply as well. The output of the amplifier will be recorded on the Arduino (providing another example of signal aliasing).
   The second half of the lab will add a single bipolar transistor to increase the current and make a class A output stage for the amplifier, as the op amp does not provide enough current to drive the 8Ω loudspeaker loudly.
   EE concepts: op amp, DC bias, bias source with unity-gain amplifier, AC coupling, gain computation.
   Lab skills: complicated breadboarding (enough wires to have problems with messy wiring). If we add the Arduino recording, we could get into interesting problems with buffer overrun if their sampling rate is higher than the Arduino’s USB link can handle.
   Equipment needed: breadboard, op amp chip, assorted resistors and capacitors, electret microphone, Arduino board, optional loudspeaker.
6. Hysteresis and capacitive touch sensor
   For the first half of the lab, students will characterize a Schmitt trigger chip, determining V_IL, V_IH, V_OL, and V_OH. Using these properties, they will design an RC oscillator circuit with a specified period or pulse width (say 10μs), and measure the frequency and pulse width of the oscillator.
   For the second half of the lab, the students will build a relaxation oscillator whose frequency is dependent on the parasitic capacitance of a touch plate, which the students can make from Al foil and plastic food wrap. In addition to breadboarding, students will wire this circuit by soldering wires and components on a PC board designed for the oscillator circuit. Students will have to measure the frequency of the oscillator with and without the plate being touched. We will provide a simple Arduino program that is sensitive to changes in the pulse width of the oscillator and that turns an LED on or off, to turn the frequency change into an on/off switch.  Students will treat the oscillator board as a 4-terminal component, and examine the effect of adding resistors or capacitors between different terminals.
   EE concepts: frequency-dependent feedback, oscillator, RC time constants, parallel capacitors.
   Lab skills: soldering, frequency measurement with digital scope.
   Equipment needed: Power supply, multimeter, Arduino, clip leads, amplifier prototyping board, oscilloscope.
7. Phototransistor and FET
   First half: characterize phototransistor in ambient light and shaded.  Characterize nFET and pFET.
   Second half: students will “tinker” with the components they have to produce a light-sensitive, noise-making toy.
   EE concepts: phototransistors, FETs.
   Equipment needed: breadboard, phototransistor, power FETs, loudspeaker, hysteresis oscillator from previous lab, oscilloscope.
8. Electrode measurements
   First, we will have the students attempt to measure the resistance of a saline solution using a pair of stainless steel electrodes and a multimeter. This should fail, as the multimeter gradually charges the capacitance of the electrode/electrolyte interface.Second, the students will use a function generator driving a voltage divider with a load resistor in the range 10–100Ω. The students will measure the RMS voltage across the resistor and across the electrodes for different frequencies from 3Hz to 300kHz (the range of the AC measurements for the Agilent 34401A Multimeter). They will plot the magnitude of the impedance of the electrodes as a function of frequency and fit an R2+(R1||C1) model to the data, most likely using gnuplot. There will be a prelab exercise to set up plotting of the model and do a little hand tweaking of parameters to help them understand what each parameter changes about the curve.Third, the students will repeat the measurements and fits for different concentrations of NaCl, from 0.01M to 1M. Seeing what parameters change a lot and what parameters change only slightly should help them understand the physical basis for the electrical model.Fourth, students will make Ag/AgCl electrodes from fine silver wire. The two standard methods for this involve either soaking in chlorine bleach or electroplating. To reduce chemical hazards, we will use the electroplating method. As a prelab exercise, students will calculate the area of their electrodes and the recommended electroplating current.  In the lab, they will adjust the voltage on the bench supplies until they get the desired plating current.Fifth, the students will measure and plot the resistance of a pair of Ag/AgCl electrodes as a function of frequency (as with the stainless steel electrodes).Sixth, if there is time, students will measure the potential between a stainless steel electrode and an Ag/AgCl electrode.EE concepts: magnitude of impedance, series and parallel circuits, variation of parameters with frequency, limitations of R+(C||R) model.Electrochemistry concepts: At least a vague understanding of half-cell potentials, current density, Ag → Ag⁺ + e^-, Ag⁺ + Cl^- → AgCl, Fe + 2 Cl^-→ FeCl₂ + 2 e^-.Lab skills: bench power supply, function generator, multimeter, fitting functions of complex numbers, handling liquids in proximity of electronic equipment.Equipment needed: multimeter, function generator, power supply, stainless steel electrode pairs, silver wires, frame for mounting silver wire, resistors, breadboard, clip leads, NaCl solutions in different concentrations, beakers for salt water, secondary containment tubs to avoid salt water spills in the electronics lab.
9. Pressure sensor and instrumentation amplifier
   Students will design an instrumentation amplifier with a gain of 300 or 500 to amplify the differential strain-gauge signal from a medical-grade pressure sensor (the Freescale MPX2300DT1), to make a signal large enough to be read with the Arduino A/D converter. The circuit will be soldered on the instrumentation amp/op amp protoboard. The sensor calibration will be checked with water depth in a small reservoir. Note: the pressure sensor comes in a package that exposes the wire bonds and is too delicate for student assembly by novice solderers. We will make a sensor module that protects the sensor and mounts the sensor side to a 3/4″ PVC male-threaded plug, so that it can be easily incorporated into a reservoir, and mounts the electronic side on a PC board with screw terminals for connecting to student circuits.  This sensor is currently being prototyped, and if it turns out to be too fragile, we will use a Freescale MPX2050GP, which has a sturdier package, but is slightly less sensitive and more expensive. (It also isn’t made of medical-grade plastics, but that is not important for this lab.) Note that we are deliberately notusing pressure sensors with integrated amplifiers, as the pedagogical point of this lab is to learn about instrumentation amplifiers.EE concepts: differential signals, twisted-pair wiring, strain gauge bridges, instrumentation amplifier, DC coupling, gain.Equipment needed: Power supply, amplifier prototyping board, oscilloscope, pressure sensor mounted in PVC plug with breakout board for easy connection, water reservoir made of PVC pipe, secondary containment tub to avoid water spills in electronics lab.
10. Class-D power amplifier
11. Electrocardiogram (EKG)
    Students will design and solder an instrumentation amplifier with a gain of 2000 and bandpass of about 0.1Hz to 100Hz. The amplifier will be used with 3 disposable EKG electrodes to display EKG signals on the oscilloscope and record them on the Arduino.Equipment needed: Instrumentation amplifier protoboard, EKG electrodes, alligator clips, Arduino, oscilloscope.

3. Systemwide Senate Regulation 760 specifies that 1 academic credit corresponds to 3 hours of work per week for the student in a 10-week quarter. Please briefly explain how the course will lead to sufficient work with reference to e.g., lectures, sections, amount of homework, field trips, etc. [Please note that if significant changes are proposed to the format of the course after its initial approval, you will need to submit new course approval paperwork to answer this question in light of the new course format.]

The combination of BME101 and BME101L is 7 units (21 hours per week).  The time will be spent approximately as follows:

• 3.5 hours lecture/discussion
• 3.5 hours reading background and circuits text
• 3 hours read lab handouts and doing pre-lab design activities
• 6 hours lab
• 5 hours writing design reports for lab

4. Include a complete reading list or its equivalent in other media.

Lab handouts: there is a 5- to 10-page handout for each week’s labs, giving background material and design goals for the lab, usually with a pre-lab design exercise.  The handouts from the prototype run of the course can be found at http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~karplus/bme194/w13/#labs
Data sheets: Students will be required to find and read data sheets for each of the components that they use in the lab.  All components are current commodity components, and so have data sheets easily found on the web.  Other readings are associated with the lecture course.

5. State the basis on which evaluation of individual students’ achievements in this course will be made by the instructor (e.g., class participation, examinations, papers, projects).

Students will be evaluated on in-lab demonstrations of skills (including functional designs) and on the weekly lab write-ups.

6. List other UCSC courses covering similar material, if known.

CMPE 167/L (sensors and sensing technologies) covers some of the same sensors and design methods, but at a more advanced level.  BME 101L would be excellent preparation for the CMPE 167/L course.

Physics 160 offers a similar level of practical electronics, but focuses on physics applications, rather than on bioengineering applications, and is only offered in alternate years.

7. List expected resource requirements including course support and specialized facilities or equipment for divisional review. (This information must also be reported to the scheduling office each quarter the course is offered.)

The course will need the equipment of a standard analog electronics teaching lab: power supply, multimeter, function generator,  oscilloscope,  computer, and soldering irons. The equipment in Baskin Engineering 150 (commonly used for EE 101L) is ideally suited for this lab. There are 12 stations in the lab, providing a capacity of 24 students since they work in pairs rather than as individuals.  The only things missing from the lab stations are soldering irons and circuit board holders (such as the Panavise Jr.), a cost of about $45 per station.  Given that a cohort of bioengineering students is currently about 35–40 students, two lab sections would have to be offered each year.

In addition, a few special-purpose setups will be needed for some of the labs, but all this equipment has already been constructed for the prototype run of the course.

There are a number of consumable parts used for the labs (integrated circuits, resistors, capacitors, PC boards, wire, and so forth), but these are easily covered by standard School of Engineering lab fees.  The currently approved lab fee is about $131, but may need some adjustment to change exactly what tools and parts are included, particularly if the students are required to buy their own soldering irons (a $20 increase).

The course requires a faculty member (simultaneously teaching the co-requisite Applied Circuits course) and a teaching assistant (for providing help in the labs and for evaluating student lab demonstrations). Because the lab is such a core part of the combined course, it requires faculty presence in the lab, not just coverage by TAs or group tutors.

8. If applicable, justify any pre-requisites or enrollment restrictions proposed for this course. For pre-requisites sponsored by other departments/programs, please provide evidence of consultation.

Students will be required to have single-variable calculus and a physics electricity and magnetism course. Both are standard prerequisites for any circuits course. Most of the labs can be done without calculus, but it is essential for the accompanying lecture course.

9. Proposals for new or revised Disciplinary Communication courses will be considered within the context of the approved DC plan for the relevant major(s). If applicable, please complete and submit the new proposal form (http://reg.ucsc.edu/forms/DC_statement_form.doc or http://reg.ucsc.edu/forms/DC_statement_form.pdf) or the revisions to approved plans form (http://reg.ucsc.edu/forms/DC_approval_revision.doc or http://reg.ucsc.edu/forms/DC_approval_revision.pdf).

This course is not expected to contribute to any major’s disciplinary communication requirement, though students will get extensive writing practice in the design reports (writing between 50 and 100 pages during the quarter).

10. If you are requesting a GE designation for the proposed course, please justify your request making reference to the attached guidelines.

No General Education code is proposed for this course, as all relevant codes will have already been satisfied by the prerequisites.

11. If this is a new course and you requesting a new GE, do you think an old GE designation(s) is also appropriate? (CEP would like to maintain as many old GE offerings as is possible for the time being.)

No General Education code is proposed for this course, as all relevant codes (old or new) will have already been satisfied by the prerequisites.

Student writing

In How does blogging about science benefit students?, Sandra Porter recommends that students (specifically biotech students at Portland COmmunity College) keep a blog :

My hypothesis is that a science blog for a science student can serve the same purpose that a portfolio serves for an artist or a set of articles serves for a writer.  Your blog can be your record of accomplishments.

Not only can your blog document your work, your blog can show that you can write, that you can spell (not a skill to take for granted), and can give you a chance to describe what you’ve done.

She describes her first job interview and what she is doing to avoid similar embarrassment for her students.  She has students in one class keep a professional lab notebook and bring it to interviews—showing that they can keep a proper lab notebook and providing documentation to support their assertion of knowing various protocols.

Student blogging is another approach she is experimenting with.  She encourages the students to use blogs as an on-line notebook (much like I’ve been doing on this blog for the circuits course), and to include the URL for the blog in resumes and cover letters for jobs.  If interviewers are interested, they can check out a few posts on the blog to see if the student can write coherently (a very important skill that can not be automatically assumed of college graduates) and, if there are search boxes and appropriate tags on the posts, whether the students know the protocols and equipment that the job requires.

In a subsequent post, The ten commandments of student science blogging, she talks about the guidelines she gives students for their blogs, to keep them from accidentally doing unprofessional things that would hurt, rather than, help their chances of getting a job.

The biggest problem I see with her recommendations is that the only audience she has identified for the student is a mysterious “job interviewer” whom the students have never met.  Writing for an unknown, difficult-to-imagine audience is hard. Writing for an imagined expert (an interviewer or professor) almost always brings out the worst writing, with inflated diction, misused jargon, and awkward ungrammatical sentences.  When writing to show that they know something to someone who knows it better, students stumble over nearly every sentence—leaving out important concepts and tossing in irrelevant minor points in a vain attempt to impress.

I think it might benefit the students to be given a more specific audience—one that they can picture writing to directly and actually informing of something new.  For an online lab notebook, it could be students at other schools (“look at the cool stuff we get to do here!”) or future students in the same lab (“never use the pink labels in the freezer—the glue on them cracks in the cold and the labels fall off”), both of whom are imaginable audiences.

The advice I gave in my circuits course is the standard advice I give to students: Write to students taking the course next year.  Assume they know what you knew coming into the course, but explain to them anything that you didn’t already know.  Make the report detailed enough that a student reading it could duplicate your work without having access to the original assignment—though they might have to looks a few things up on the web or in text books. (Provide pointers to appropriate readings, when possible.)  Explain not just what you did, but why, and provide warnings to help your reader avoid mistakes that you made.

Most of the students in the circuits course got this idea, and the reports were mostly coherent and directed at the right audience, though they were a little light on pointers to appropriate reading.

One thing that Sandra Porter doesn’t mention in her “ten commandments”, but which I had to really rant about in my course: “Get the details right!”  Sandra mentions spelling and punctuation, which are markers for attention to details, but the accuracy of the content is far more important. I can forgive an occasional typo (though failure to run text through a spell checker indicates a level of sloppiness that would disturb me as a job interviewer), but the main engineering content needs to be checked and double-checked, both for consistency with the lab notebook notes and for general sanity (recompute the corner frequency from the RC values in the schematic—is that what was intended?).

If you are giving a circuit schematic, every wire must be correctly connected, every component must have the correct value, and pin numbers should be correct.  The students  in the circuits course had incredible difficulty with checking their own and each other’s work for accuracy, and obvious errors (like power-ground shorts) occurred on most of the assignment first drafts.  For a biotech student, the equivalent would be getting the wrong reagent in a protocol, putting ice in autoclave, or replacing µg with mg.

The rate of errors in schematics did not drop much over the quarter, though I felt it should have.  Other writing problems (like poor audience assessment, overuse of passive, or misuse of “would”) were generally fixed after being pointed out, but the sloppiness in the circuit diagrams continued to be a problem all quarter.  By “sloppiness” I don’t mean poor drawing skills, as most of the students used CircuitLab to draw neat schematics, but semantic errors that changed the meaning of the circuits.

If anyone has ideas for improving student attention to details in schematics, I’d appreciate hearing them.

Bar exam for circuits class

Front of T-shirt

Back of T-shirt. The silkscreen is intended as a white silkscreen over a black T-shirt.

Because the applied circuits course did not have a final exam, the students asked if we could get together at a bar for a beer during the exam time instead (which my son quipped should be considered a “bar exam”).  Because we had some underage students in the class, I chose Caffe Pergolesi as a site (they serve beer but also coffee, hot chocolate, and coffee-house snacks).  The café was surprisingly crowded for 4 p.m. on a Tuesday (probably due to it being the first day of exam week), and I had to sit out on the deck, because there were no tables available inside.  At first I was a bit worried that no one would show up (a common problem for parties I’ve tried to have in the past, so I’ve stopped attempting to have parties), especially when no one was there by 4:10.  But the students started trickling in and we eventually had all the students in the class—even those who had sent e-mail saying they couldn’t make it.

I showed the students the T-shirt design, modified according to their suggestions the day before, and they approved it.  I still need to check with the screen printer that the SVG files I have will work—I think that the back is ok (it is a single black rectangle for the T-shirt with a single path for the white layer on top), but I’m worried about the front. The text, slug, and small thought bubbles should be fine, but the black images on the large thought bubble are currently objects on top of the white thought bubble, and I’ve not figured out how to get Inkscape to make them cuts through the thought bubble to the black T-shirt underneath.  The Inkscape “path difference” operation, which worked for the back of the T-shirt doesn’t do the right thing with these images.  So far I’ve gotten 7 orders for T-shirts from the class (including one for me and one for my son), and I’m hoping for another 5 or 6 to amortize the setup costs.  I think that we’ll have about $90 in setup plus $12/shirt, so 7 shirts would be about $25 each and 12 shirts would be about $20 each (long sleeve shirts a couple of bucks more).

I used the time to get feedback from the class about how it should be modified in future, starting from a handout I’d given them the day before.  Here are some of my notes from the discussion.  If I’ve missed anything, I hope that students will send me e-mail.

• Parts and tools to eliminate:  velcro cable ties (unused), long-nose pliers (low quality and not used), thermometers (change to lab equipment), LEDs (not used).
• Parts and tools to add: inductor for class D amplifier, soldering iron.  A soldering station like the one I have (and similar to the ones they used in the lab this year) would add $20 to the cost of the course.
• It may be worthwhile upgrading the screwdriver set, as the under $2 set was really low-quality and some of the screwdrivers failed (blade slipped in handle, so that screwdriver did not turn with handle).
• I had been worried about the high price for the large assortment of resistors ($13.35 for 1120 resistors, 10 each of 112 sizes), but the students liked that they always had whatever resistor size they needed, and were contemptuous of the approach used in EE101 of providing students with only about 20 resistors of the precise sizes that the faculty had decided the students would use.
• One student suggested having a protoboard for designing the class D amplifier, since that is something they might want to keep.  I’ll have to think about that, as it doesn’t strike me as an immediate win, though I can see wanting to keep the power amplifier.  One problem is that the class-D amplifier is not as generic a project as the instrumentation amplifiers, so it is harder to come up with a general-purpose protoboard. Also, most students ended up having to do a lot of experimenting to get the biasing to work out for the power FETs, which could be difficult on a PC board.  The class-D amplifier also needs a bit more space than the two instrumentation amp projects, so a PC board for it would have to be bigger ($2/board instead of $1/board).  Having the same protoboard for both the pressure-sensor lab and the EKG lab meant that time spent learning how to use the protoboard was amortized over two projects, which would not be the case for a special-purpose power-amp board.
• One student suggested adding a voltmeter for home use, but the problem there is that voltmeters that can read AC voltage correctly for 100kHz signals are mostly in the $100-and-up range.  The $5 voltmeters that could be put in a kit for everyone to buy are not useful for some of the labs.
• Students suggested that the first quiz should be given as homework instead of a quiz—a good idea, since the questions were too hard for the students as a quiz, and having time to think about them and discuss them with each other would lead to more learning.
• The students do not think that adding a textbook to the class would help, but being directed to the All about Circuits readings more often (including the worksheets) might help.  They generally found the Wikipedia articles too detailed and too broad to be helpful in learning the material.  They got fairly good at at searching the web for keywords and finding lecture powerpoints from other courses that were relevant.  No one found a steady source of good material though—the searches tended to find different sources for each topic.  The students reported being able to find data sheets fairly easily and consulting them fairly often, so at least one of the goals of the course was met.
• One student reported that soldering the instrumentation amp for the pressure sensor lab seemed a bit pointless to some, as they don’t buy the pressure sensors to connect to, so a permanent board is not much use. The benefits (soldering practice and less noise pickup from long wires) may not justify the extra effort of soldering.
• We discussed re-ordering the labs, moving the electrode measuring and modeling lab later, and the sampling and aliasing lab earlier.  A possible new order is
  1. Thermistor
  2. Sampling and aliasing
  3. Microphone
  4. Audio amp
  5. Hysteresis oscillator
  6. FET and phototransistor
  7. Electrode modeling
  8. Pressure sensor
  9. Class-D power amplifier
  10. EKG

  That order could cause some difficulty for the sampling lab, which needs RC filter design (hence complex impedance), so maybe swapping the mic and sampling labs would be better.

• We also discussed the idea of having 2 labs a week (both Tuesday and Thursday), with a data analysis day in between (to teach gnuplot scripting and fitting models).  None of the students had done model fitting (other than straight lines) in any other course, so this is a skill worth spending a bit more time on in class.  Having 2 105-minute labs a week (the standard TTh time slot) would probably not be enough, as that is barely more than the 3-hour lab weekly lab this quarter, and the setup time would probably eliminate any gains.  I’d probably have to schedule 2 time slots per lab (say 10–1:45, 2–5:45, or 6–9:45).  If the course grows to full size, I would be spending 8–12 hours in the lab on Tuesdays and Thursdays, without break.
• If I do have more lab time next year, I could start a little slower, using the first week to have students learn to identify all the parts, mark the capacitor bags with the capacitor sizes, learn to use the ohmmeter and power supplies, … .  Some of the later labs would have no more time than this year, but some of them needed no extra time.
• Students would like several explanations to come earlier in the course relative to the labs—FETs before the microphone lab, PN junctions and phototransistors before the tinkering lab, block diagrams earlier in the course, … .  I agree, and moving the first labs a week later could help with that.  I’ll be doing a day-by-day topic planner before resubmitting the course approval paperwork.  One problem with teaching block diagrams earlier is that—like outlining in writing—they’re really only useful once the complexity of the design gets high enough that subdividing the problem is useful.
• The students were pretty pleased with the data logger software that my son wrote.  The biggest complaint was about the logger freezing when recording a long run at high sampling rate (a known problem).  I believe that he is developing a fix for that problem, which will generally result in faster live charts.  Students also like the idea of being able to produce eps, pdf, png, or svg output directly from the data logger, so that they didn’t feel the need to make screenshots.  Providing starter gnuplot scripts (which they could then add to in order to do model fitting) was also attractive to them.  There was one request for icon-based executables (avoiding the command line), but I actually prefer for engineering students to have to learn to use command-line tools—I was shocked that they had gotten to their senior year and had not learned how to use command lines.
• Students thought that the current prereqs for the course were fine—they did not see a need to add a programming prereq, unless the course was changed in a major way to include Arduino programming (which I’m not tempted to do, as there are already courses on campus covering that).  They did think that the course needed to remain an upper-division course, but that sophomores might be able to handle it by the Spring (which is when it will be scheduled in future).
• Some students thought that the course could be reduced to 9 labs (from 10)—mainly to reduce the number of reports written.  I think that we could achieve that by putting the microphone lab and audio amp lab together and having 3 lab sessions with only one report.  We might be able to combine the hysteresis lab and the tinkering (FET and phototransistor) lab into one report also.
• The students really liked the undergrad group tutor we had—saying that he was the best TA they’d ever had.  I believe that he is graduating this year (as are all the students in the course), so I don’t know whether we’ll be able to get as good an assistant next year.
• Students liked having learned gnuplot, though they initially struggled with it and hated it.  Once they got past the initial learning, they found it useful for senior theses and courses other than the circuits course.
• Overall, students thought that the class had met most of the learning goals I had set for it, and several of them wished the course had been available to them earlier—some of them might even have opted for the bioelectronics track (they were all biomolecular track), had they taken this course early enough (and if EE would accept it as prereq to the other upper-division courses needed for bioelectronics).  I’m certainly going to try to convince the EE faculty that this course can serve as more than adequate preparation for courses like signals and systems (better than the existing circuits course).

The students in the class gave me two bottles of wine as a thank-you for the course—that is a first for me in 30 years of being a professor.  Most often students are glad to have survived my courses, but don’t generally appreciate them until several years later.

The student appreciation certainly isn’t because I’ve been grading leniently—the class is mostly in the B- to B+ range, and some had to go through 2 or 3 drafts of the lab reports to get to even that level. There may be one or two A- grades (I still have the last 2 lab reports to grade, so I don’t know yet—I’m hopeful, but I’m not going to give out As unless the work justifies them).

I think that the recognized that I was genuinely interested not just in the material but in getting them to do real engineering design and to think like engineers.  Several have taken to heart the “try it and see” mantra and have learned to appreciate the value of “sanity checks”.  I think that the value of a UC education lies mainly in these high-contact “artisanal” courses, not in the mega-lectures and cookbook labs that they have mostly been suffering through.  (To be fair, many of them are working on senior theses in various faculty labs, so they have had high-contact educational experiences—just not structured as a required course.)

 

Last day of circuits class

Today was an attempt to cover questions that students had sent me over the weekend.

I talked a little about PN junctions (using the analogy of diffusion of sodium and potassium across the cell membrane from last week’s guest lecture to discuss the voltage that is produced by diffusion of holes and electrons across the PN junction).  We then covered diodes, photodiodes (and photovoltaic cells), bipolar transistors, and phototransistors.  That whole lecture needs to come before the phototransistor lab.

I then talked about class A, B, and C amplifiers: all of which are the same amplifier structure, but with different bias voltages.  I described (in rough terms) the efficiency of each circuit and gave an application for a class C amplifier driving a LC resonant load.  I then gave a crude bipolar class AB output circuit, as basically two class-B circuits with opposite polarities.

We also discussed (very briefly) brushed DC motors and stepper/brushless motors.

We ended with some redesign of the T-shirt for the course.  I’ll be showing them a new draft of the design tomorrow and taking their orders. Once the design is finalized, I’ll put a rendition of it on this blog—though it will not be the original design, since I’m doing this one in SVG using Inkscape, and WordPress.com still doesn’t support svg images.

 

Twenty-eighth day of circuits class

Yesterday’s lecture was a mish-mash of odds and ends that we hadn’t covered well previously, and questions that had come up.

I started with talking about where the EKG signal comes from.  The guest lecturer on Wednesday had done a good job of covering action potentials, but I pointed out that we were not sticking electrodes into their heart muscle cells: we had access to only the outside of the cells.  So where was the differential signal we were measuring coming from?  This had been one of my first puzzles in trying to understand how an EKG works, and they were mostly just as clueless about it as I had been.  The explanation that I settled on was looking at each of the cells as a little capacitor with a battery that charged it and a switch that discharged it, with one side accessible to us.  There is a resistance from each cell to each of the differential electrodes, and from the differential electrodes to the body reference electrode, so that the measurement electrodes act like they are in a voltage divider between the cell and the reference electrode.  The voltage difference between the differential electrodes depends on the difference in resistance from the cell to the electrodes, and the signal we see depends on the change in position of the discharge wave.  If everything depolarized at the same time, we’d see almost no difference voltage, but as the wave sweeps from left-to-right (or right-to left) we see difference voltages.    It’s not a perfect explanation of where the EKG signal comes from, but it is better than leaving them thinking that they are seeing the action potential directly.

After that a question came up about the 60Hz noise in the EKG signal, and where it came from.  I talked about the loop formed by the LA and RA wires and the body between them as an electromagnetic pickup, and how we could reduce the electromagnetic pickup by twisting the wires together more to reduce the area of the loop.  I also discussed capacitive coupling of 60Hz into the wires, reminding them of the capacitive touch sensor they had made earlier in the quarter.  We talked a bit about shielding cables and Faraday cages.  While on the subject of noise, I also mentioned the problem of microphonics in the nanopore equipment.  We have not discussed thermal noise or other problems of designing for very small signals.

Students asked where the 60Hz hum in their class-D power amplifiers came from, and I talked about ground loops and noise pickup in their power lines.  The op amps they were using had excellent power-supply noise rejection, but the voltage reference they were using (a pair of resistors as a voltage divider and a unity-gain buffer) provides an excellent path for noise in the power supply to be coupled into the amplifier.  I talked about two ways to reduce the hum: using twisted cables for the DC power, to reduce the electromagnetic pickup of 60Hz noise, and using a Zener diode reference instead of a simple voltage divider for the Vref signal.  I’m wondering whether I should add Zener diodes to the parts kit next year, or even whether I should get an adjustable voltage reference like the TL431ILP.  Either one is about 20¢ each in the small quantities that we would need.  The Zener diode is easier to explain, but the adjustable voltage reference is more versatile (the voltage is set by 2 external resistors as a voltage divider with the output of the voltage divider held at 2.5V) and has less variation in voltage with current (output impedance of 0.2Ω instead of 5–30Ω).  One minor problem with the TL431LP is that the lowest reference voltage it provides is 2.5V (using a wire from the “cathode” to the reference feedback input).  Since we are doing everything with power supplies of 5V or more, this shouldn’t be a problem for us.

After talking about noise, a question came up about the fat wires used for loudspeakers in stereo systems and whether they were shielded.  I managed to get the class to come up with the correct explanation: that the wires are fat to reduce resistance and avoid I²R power losses.  Currents to loudspeakers tend to be pretty big, since the resistance of the speaker itself is typically only 8Ω.  We talked about microphone cables being shielded (nowadays, I think that they are mostly twisted pairs inside a foil or metalized plastic shield, rather than coaxial cable) but that the tiny voltages and currents that speaker wires would pick up not mattering, since the signals were not amplified.  I also mentioned that solar panels were generally wired with fat wires also, to reduce the I²R power losses, since the voltages of the solar panels were fairly low (12V or 24V).

The students did not come up with any questions, so I pulled out one that had been asked weeks ago in lab: how sine-wave oscillators work.  The students had build square-wave oscillators with Schmitt triggers, and had used function generators, but had not seen any sine-wave oscillators.  I decided to do a classic oscillator: the Wien-bridge oscillator, since it uses the building blocks and concepts they are familiar with: a differential amplifier and two voltage dividers as a bridge circuit.  I started out with a generic bridge (just an impedance on each arm) and we got 3 formulas relating the nodes of the amplifier: , , and , from which we derived the stability condition .  This was all review for them, as they had had bridge nulling on a quiz.

The Wien bridge oscillator circuit. I initially gave it with just a resistor, not a light bulb, for R1, since the analysis is easier that way. The neat thing about the light bulb is that it provides an automatic gain control to set its resistance to  R2/2.

I then gave them the circuits for each arm of the bridge (just resistors on the negative feedback divider, and a series RC and a parallel RC for the arms of the positive feedback divider).  Rather than do complex impedance calculations, we just did Bode plots of the impedance of each of the RC arms, from which we could see that the voltage divider had zero output at DC and ∞ frequency, with a maximum at .  We were running out of time, so I did not derive with them that the gain of the positive voltage divider was 1/2 at that frequency, but jumped immediately to describing the use of an incandescent bulb in the negative feedback circuit to provide automatic gain adjustment (though I just waved my hands at it, not really showing how the thermal feedback mechanism worked).  I also managed to mention the historical importance of this oscillator design as the first product of Hewlett-Packard, and the start of “Silicon Valley”.

The range over which the automatic gain control with the light bulb works is determined by the range of resistance for the bulb filament. When the bulb is cold, its resistance must be less than R2/2. When the output is a sine wave with amplitude equal to the power supply, the resistance of the bulb filament must be larger than R2/2.  When the circuit is stable, the RMS voltage on the  bulb will be 1/3 the RMS voltage of the output, and the bulb filament resistance will be R2/2.  Nowadays other non-linear components are used rather than bulbs for the gain control, since bulbs suffer from microphonics and (for low frequencies) insufficient low-pass filtering (they are relying on the thermal mass of the filament to provide the low-pass filter of the automatic gain control).

On Monday, I plan to answer other questions students have, if they can come up with anything that confused them over the quarter.  If they can’t come up with any questions for me and send them to me this weekend, then maybe I’ll have to come up with some questions for them as an impromptu quiz.