ECE 2074 Electric Circuit Analysis Laboratory Fall 2013 Course Description:

The object of this lab is to design, analyze, and then construct simple DC and first order RC circuits with the student-owned Lab-in-a-Box system. Experiments include: characterization of breadboard backplane wiring; component tolerances; Ohms law; Kirchhoffs laws; series and parallel resistors; voltage and current dividers; delta-wye configurations; mesh-current and node-voltage analysis; superposition and Thvenin equivalents; inverting and non-inverting amplifier circuits; series RC and RL circuits; integrator and differentiator circuits. The lab includes introductory design experiments such as a night light circuit, a simple logic probe, or other experiments employing the concepts learned and some elementary electronics. Experiments will be announced as the semester progresses. Requires a C-or better in ENGE 1104 or 1204. (3H, 1C)

Graduate Teaching Assistants:

See http://www.opel.ece.vt.edu for a list of the GTAs and the times that they are available.

Course Supervisors:
Dr. Dennis Sweeney Rm 240 Whittemore Hall Office Hours: M: 1100-1200, W: 1300 -1400, Th: 1100-1200, by appointment dsweeney@vt.edu

Getting Help
There are numerous ways to get help if you get stuck. 1. Think! Most of the lab exercises should take only an couple of hours at most IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING. If you are spending hours and getting nowhere, ask yourself if maybe a different path is needed? There is an old saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result. 2. Ask the TA's in the OpEL. They are there to do more than validations. the OpEL website for the schedule. Check

3. Ask the TA's in Rm 255 Whittemore. They are the Circuits and Electronics Support Group. They support a lot different courses so they may not be familiar with details of all the labs, but they are very good, generally have more time, and can give individual help. Be sure to be able to describe what you have done. The schedule is on the door outside of Rm 255. 4. Talk to the instructor. He may not have all the details either since the lab material is the work of numerous folks over a period of years, but he has been the engineering business for 40 years! Generally emailed questions can be answered within a few hours. Due to the number of students in lab classes, the instructor gets several hundred email a week. Include the course number in the title line. Failure to do so may mean your email is not answered.

Prerequisites: ENGE 1104 or 1204 Corequisite: ECE 2004 and MATH 2214 Learning Objectives:
Having successfully completed this course, the student will be able to: Build circuits described in the catalog description and syllabus on a student-owned analog and digital trainer kit using tools and components to departmental wiring standards. Measure and characterize the circuits built and described above using a digital multimeter and a student-owned oscilloscope. Analyze and model circuit performance using modern mathematical tools such as MatLab and PSpice and compare with measurements.

Recommended Texts:
R.W. Hendricks and K. Meehan, Lab-in-a-Box: Introductory Experiments in Electric Circuits, 3rd Edition (2009) or the revised 3rd Edition (2011). R.B. Lineberry, W.C. Headley and R.W. Hendricks, RSR/VT Analog and Digital ANDY User Manual and Test Procedure, Ver. 2.0 (2005), available on-line at http://www.ece.vt.edu/cel/Kits/A&D-User-Manual&TestProcedure-v2.2.pdf J.G. Tront, PSpice for Basic Circuit Analysis, 2nd Edition, McGraw-Hill (2007), ISBN 0-07-10365-9. xi, 145 pp.

Required Software:
MATLAB (provided with the freshman engineering software package) PSpice 9.1 or higher (Demo version provided with Tront or available from various sites on the department websites see announcement on course Scholar site) or Cadence Virtuoso (available for remote access through the Computing and Visualization Laboratory website http://computing.ece.vt.edu/ ) or the OpEL website: http://www.opel.ece.vt.edu/. Pspice can be tricky to install. Follow the OpEL instructions carefully.

Students are expected to have working copies of this software. ECE IT support staff are available to help students with specific problems. In general, non operational software will not accepted as reason for late assignments.

Special Equipment:
Students are required to acquire a laboratory kit (known as Lab-in-a-Box or LiaB) when they start the introductory required courses in both the EE and the CpE curriculum.

Students must purchase: 1. 2. RSR/VT Analog and Digital Trainer (ANDY Board) Digilent Analog Discovery 2 channel oscilloscope with arbitrary function generator. Also order the BNC adapter board. http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Catalog.cfm?NavPath=2,842&Cat=17 MY-64 digital multimeter or equivalent http://www.elexp.biz/vir_ece2074.htm Test probe kit identified on Electronix Express website (link is posted on OpEL website (http://www.elexp.biz/vir_ece2074.htm) Tool kit or own a wire stripper

3. 4. 5.

The ECE Department will supply each student with an electronic components kit for your experiments. The department-supplied components along with the ANDY board and oscilloscope will be used in ECE 2074, ECE 2504, ECE 3074, and ECE 3504. Assignments that may require the ANDY board and/or oscilloscope may be given in any future ECE course and students are expected to have the board and oscilloscope readily available. Therefore, do not resell these items before graduation. Demonstration of oscilloscope usage during circuit validation will be required for some experiments. Therefore, students must be prepared to transport their personal oscilloscopes to the Open Electronics Laboratory (OpEL) as needed. Students who own equipment with at least the same capabilities do not have to purchase items #2 and #3. Although each of the items above is available from different suppliers, and students may buy equipment with equal or better specifications from these sources, we have developed a special, low cost single source of supply through Electronix Express who has developed an exclusive site (http://www.elexp.biz/vir_ece2074.htm) to their educational store. Students should go to the Digilent website (http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Catalog.cfm?NavPath=2,842&Cat=17)to purchase the Analog Discovery scope. Note that Electronix Express has a different scope that is being used in other classes. Make sure you get the correct one! If you ordered the scope, voltmeter, etc. in a timely way and don't receive them in time, bring your order receipt to Dr. Sweeney. There are a limited number of loaners for those who ordered items but have not received them. You are responsible for obtaining the LaiB items in a timely manner.

Website:
All assignments and course related materials are including lectures will be available at the ECE2074 course website on Scholar:https://scholar.vt.edu/ . If you are correctly enrolled, ECE2074 should appear on the list of active sites. If it doesn't appear, you aren't registered. See the undergraduate advisor immediately.

Assignments:
This course consists of weekly lab experiments. Down load the worksheet for the correct lab from Scholar. Lecture material for each lab is also on Scholar. Complete the worksheet and upload it to Scholar, do the lab quiz on Scholar. Build and test your circuit. Once you complete the worksheet, quiz, and circuit you must validate your circuit in the OpEL. You must complete the on line quiz and upload the lab worksheet to Scholar before you can validate. All lab reports must be submitted electronically via Scholar. You will receive a confirmation email when you have successfully uploaded your report. That email will have a confirmation number. SAVE THAT EMAIL, YOUR UPLOAD IS NOT COMPLETE UNTIL YOU GET THAT EMAIL!! After you upload, download your assignment to insure that it has not been corrupted. Given the variability of computers and Internet connections, you are responsible for the upload and its integrity. Worksheets will be accepted up to 24 hours late, however there is a 50% grade reduction for late submissions and no credit is give after 24 hours. There have been numerous situations where students have uploaded incorrect assignments. You can upload multiple times but once the upload load window closes, Scholar (not the instructor) does not permit changes. YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR UPLOADING THE CORRECT ASSIGNMENT IN A TIMELY MANNER. FAILURE TO DO SO WILL RESULT IS LOSS OF CREDIT. Worksheets and quizzes must be completed by 1 pm on Wednesdays. Validations must be completed by 8pm on Wednesdays (see schedule on following page). In order to receive credit for the the entire lab, the quiz must be completed, the worksheet must be summited, and the lab must be validated. No credit is given for the entire lab if one of these components is missing. Zero quiz scores (ie. all the answers incorrect) or a zero score for the worksheet (ie. nothing of substance submitted) will be counted as a missing submission. Scholar (not the instructor) does not permit late uploads of worksheets after the time window closes. Don't email the instructor with your report and request that it be uploaded. All worksheets must be submitted by the due date or within the 24 hour grace period. The 50% grade reduction during the grace period will be waived for absences excused by the dean of students. You can always start early. The lab material will be posted approximately 7 days before the validation deadline. Lab templates will be provided but your submissions must be converted to .pdf files when you upload the worksheet to Scholar. You must submit in .pdf. Other formats will not be accepted and you will not receive credit for your submission.

Grading:
Quiz: Worksheets: Validation: Total 100% Students will get immediate feedback on the correctness of quiz questions but the 20% 40% 40%

answers will be released 48 hours after the validation deadline. become final seven (7) days after they are released.

All grades

Validation Procedure:
Each student must come to the Open Electronics Laboratory (OpEL) in Whittemore Hall, Room 219 or Room 222, during OpEL hours and validate their experiment before the deadline. The worksheet must be submitted and the quiz must be completed before a validation can be done. During the validation, the TA will ask the student to perform a validation procedure. There are no late validations without an excused absence from the Dean of Students Office. Grading: IMPORTANT! Your grade for a particular lab will count as a ZERO if the validation is not performed or you do not meet the validation deadline. At validation, you will receive a validation grade and a confirming email. Until you receive that email, your grade is not complete. Do not leave the OpEL until you get the confirming email. If you leave and discover later that your grade was not recorded, your grade is ZERO. If you must leave right away, you can request a written confirmation from the TA.

Make-up Lab Policy:

There will be one but if a complete up lab, the grade (worksheet, quiz, make up lab at the end of the semester. This lab is optional, lab (worksheet, quiz, and validation) is submitted for the make for the make up lab will be substituted for the lowest lab grade validation).

Honor Code Policy:

Students in this course are expected to strictly observe the Virginia Tech Honor Code. Discussion of ideas and approaches are permitted and encouraged but all assignments must be completed individually without unauthorized assistance. All material submitted for a grade, quizzes, worksheets, and circuits for validation must be your own work. Submitting anything for a grade that you did not personally create is an honor code violation and will be treated as such. Group worksheets where a student does part of a worksheet assignment and several students merge material to complete the worksheet or scope plots, Pspice simulations, or screen shots created by someone other than the submitting student are unacceptable. A word to the wise: don't. Metadata added by word processors, Pspice, etc. can be used to identify the conditions under which something was created. OpEL TA's will ask you to deconstruct you circuit after validation. At upload, you will be asked to check the acceptance of the honor code box. If you do not, Scholar will not accept your submission. Without the honor code verification, your submission is not complete.

Special Needs:
Students with special needs are encouraged to meet with the course instructor within the first week of classes.

Notes:
(1) This lab is a work in progress and there maybe different versions. current version is on the Scholar website. The

(2) Students are expected to verify that the lab report has been uploaded to Scholar before the deadline. It appears that the clock used on Scholar is not highly accurate and can run as much as 5 minutes fast. Please take this into consideration when submitting your reports. Also, the file size limitation can be much less than the advertised 100 Mb. When possible, insert images in a .gif or .png format rather than .jpg or .bmp. Another problem that can prevent uploading is forgetting to check the Honor Code statement. (3) Observe the time out on Scholar. Scholar will time out and close your window in about 30 minutes of inactivity. If you are taking a quiz, it will close the quiz and submit it even if you haven't completed it. You may submit a quiz a second time in the event of time out, however Scholar will not permit a third submission. You have two opportunities to take the quiz. Scholar takes the LAST quiz submitted. More than one student has attempted to get a better grade by taking the quiz a second time. You do that at your own risk. If you get a lower grade the second time, THAT IS YOUR GRADE! (4)The Scholar clocks can be as much as 5 minutes off so it is not wise to wait to the last second for submission.

Schedule of Experiments:
The experiments covered in this course along with their due dates are listed below.

Worksheet, quiz & Validation Due Date Quiz 0 by 09/04/13 Wednesday Pick up lab kit by 09/05/13 Thursday 09/11/13 Wednesday 09/18/13 Wednesday 09/25/13 Wednesday 10/02/13 Wednesday 10/09/13 Wednesday 10/16/13 Wednesday 10/23/13 Wednesday 10/30/13 Wednesday 11/06/13 Wednesday 11/13/13 Wednesday 11/20/13 Wednesday 11/23/13 to 12/01/13 12/04/13 Wednesday

Week

Lab Title

Pick up a lab kit and order scope/voltmeter, ANDY board, take Quiz 00

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Thanksgiving Break 12

ANDY Board and voltmeter basics Pspice Introduction Kirchoffs Laws Nodal and Mesh Analysis Wheatstone Bridge Thevenin and Norton Equivalents Function Generator, Oscilloscope, and Operational Amplifiers Series RC circuits Differentiators/Integrators The 555 timer Logic Probe

Make up with night light application of the Wheatstone Bridge