How to turn your physics book into a capacitor!
A page by Devin Boyer

The Theory - The Finished Product - The Tools, The Plan - Parallel Circuits - Series Circuits - Bibliography

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The Tools, The Plan

Now that I have what seems to be a working calculator, it is time to test it out, and explore its behavior in real circuits. For this test, we have many tools that are paramount to my ability to perform these tests.

The first device is the Impedance Meter, which you were already introduced to when I used it to find the capacitance of my text book.


Impedance meter

This is a quite capable device, and can be used to measure a lot more than simple capacitance.

The next device is a function generator. This device is used to produce a signal of arbitrary waveform, amplitude, and frequency. For most of this experiment, it is used to produce a square wave at 300Hz. The output was set to go between 7.5V and -7.5V, although this value doesn't really matter much; it just so happened that a 15V peak to peak signal gave very clear output.


Function generator

In order to simulate resistances, I used a pair of "ohm-rangers". These devices have switches on them that allow you to set any resistance you want, from zero all the way up to megaohms. Both were set to 1K ohm, in order to make the circuit easier to analyze.


Ohm ranger

The last device, probably the most complicated and useful, is the oscilloscope. The oscilloscope is capable of displaying a voltage over time graph. The oscilloscope available to me was a two channel model, which means that it is possible to put both the output and the input onto the same graph.


Two channel digital oscilloscope

With these devices, and some cables, it is possible to put together some simple parallel and series circuits to explore capacitance.