Gas station without pumps

2014 April 7

Feedback on first lab report

Filed under: Circuits course,Printed Circuit Boards — gasstationwithoutpumps @ 17:11
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Most of today’s class was taken up with feedback on the design reports that students turned in by e-mail on Saturday.  Overall the reports were not bad (better than the first reports last year), but I think that the students could do better.  Here are the main points:

• Anyone can redo the report to get it re-evaluated (and probably get a higher grade).
• No one attempted theV1 &V2 problem, so I reassigned it for Wednesday.

The circuit I had given as an exercise, asking them to determine the output voltage V_out.

• A lot of reports mixed together two different problems:the 1kΩ–3.3kΩ problem and the optimization to maximize sensitivity of the thermistor temperature sensor.  I encouraged students to use more section headers and avoid mixing different problems together.
• Figures should be numbered and have paragraph-long captions below each figure.  I reminded students that most engineering reports are not read in detail—readers flip through looking at the pictures and reading the picture captions. If the pictures and captions don’t have most of the content, then most readers will miss it. I also pointed out that many faculty, when creating new journal articles, don’t ask for an outline, but ask for the figures.  Once the figures tell the right story, the rest of the writing is fairly straightforward.
• A lot of the students misused  “would” in their writing, treating as some formal form of “to be”. The main use in technical writing is for contrary-to-fact statements: “the temperature would go down, if dissipating power cooled things instead of heating them”.  Whenever I see “would” in technical writing, I want to know why whatever is being talked about didn’t happen.
• A number of the students had the correct answer for the optimization problem, but had not set up or explained the optimization. Right answers are not enough—there must be a rational justification for them. In some cases, the math was incomprehensible, with things that weren’t even well-formed equations. I suspect that in many cases, the students had copied down the answer without really understanding how it was derived and without copying down the intermediate steps in their lab notebooks, so they could not redo the derivation for the report.
• A number of the plots showed incomplete understanding of gnuplot: improperly labeled axes, improperly scaled axes, plots that only included data and not the models that the data was supposed to match, and so forth. I pointed out the importance of sanity checks—there was no way that anyone ran their recording for 1E10 seconds! I was particularly bothered that no one had plotted the theoretical temperature vs. voltage calibration based on the parameters from their temperature vs. resistance measurements, so I could not tell whether the voltage divider was doing what they expected it to.
• No one really got the solution for the 1kΩ–3.3kΩ problem perfectly. A number of them set up the equations right and solved for R (getting 2.538kΩ), but then not figuring out what Vin had to be.  It turns out that Vin depends strongly on R, so rounding R to 2.2kΩ or 2.7kΩ results in different good values for Vin, and the 2.2kΩ choice gives a more desirable voltage (around 3.3v, which we have available from the KL25Z boards, as it is a standard power-supply voltage).

I also showed the students how I had expected them to setup and explain the optimization to maximize sensitivity at a particular operating temperature.

After that feedback, I started on new material, getting the explanation of amplitude, peak-to-peak, and RMS voltage. I think that the RMS voltage explanation was a bit rough.  I was deriving it from the explanation that we wanted a measurement that represented the same power dissipation in a resistor as the DC voltage, and I got everything set up with the appropriate integrals, but I forgot the trig identity $(cos(\omega t))^2 =\frac{1}{2} (1-cos(2 \omega t))$, and ran out of time before I could get it right.  I did suggest that they look up the trig identity and finish the integration.

I had hoped to get at least partway into Euler’s formula, complex sinusoids, and phasors, but the feedback took longer than I had expected. Those topics will have to wait until Wednesday or even Friday, since Wednesday we’ll want to do the modeling of the DC characteristics of the electret mic, and talk about how the mic works.