In this lab you will learn modern laboratory instrumentation using an arduino. In a typical experiment you have some physical quantity that you want to measure and/or control, such as temperature, pressure, displacement, force, frequency, intensity, etc. Or you may want to determine the response of a system to a stimulus, like how does electrical resistence vary with temperature. Of course, you want to do this with a computer and also use the computer to analyze the results.
In this lab you will learn how to control the temperature of a Thermoelectric Cooler (TEC) from 0C - 70C using the arduino hardware and software programming environment. Arduinos are inexpensive data acquisition devices that communicate over a serial interface with your compiuter. You will learn the arduino programming environment and build the circutry to drive a TEC and you will characterize how well the system works (does it hit its set points? how stable is the temperature? how long does it take to change temperatures?). You will also use the circuit to measure the thermoelectric coefficient (Seebeck Coefficient) itself. In a second lab, you can use the TEC controller you built to measure the temperature distribution in a rod and you will model the distribution both numerically in MatLab and analytically.