Hall current measuring apparatus having a series resistor for temperature compensation Patent

Current measurement by use of Hall effect generato

Teaching Programmable Microcontrollers to Novice Users in a College of Agriculture: Effects on Attitude, Self-Efficacy, and Knowledge

This thesis consists of two articles that examined an instructional treatment based on the use of Arduino UNO R3 programmable microcontrollers in a fundamentals of agriculture systems technology course at the University of Arkansas. The first article examined students’ breadboarding and programming self-efficacy and knowledge of Arduino. The treatment consisted of a three-class-period instructional treatment, starting with a pretest before instruction to measure students’ baseline interest, knowledge, and self-efficacy of breadboarding and programming Arduino. This was followed with a short 30-minute instructional video explaining basic Arduino programming and breadboarding. Next a hands-on laboratory activity requiring students to breadboard and program an LED circuit was conducted. The activity was graded and rubrics were returned to the students before they took the posttest. Students’ mean scores for breadboarding and programming self-efficacy and Arduino knowledge were higher after the instructional treatment, while the observed mean for interest slightly declined. The second article examined the rubric scores from the hands-on laboratory activity and evaluated where students most commonly made errors breadboarding and programming. Rubric scores on Arduino breadboarding were 58.5% and programming 23.5%, leading us to conclude that students needed more instruction on Arduino programming and in breadboarding simple electronic circuits. The single most common error made when programming was the lack of writing simple comments at the end of each line of the program sketch to describe what the command is doing. The second most common error in programming was not writing the command to correctly identify a digital pin as an output. For breadboarding, the two most common errors were that students were unable to correctly “forward-bias” an LED and wire a single 240ohm resistor in series in the circuit. Both articles produced findings worth implementing into a future redesigned study where novice agriculture students are introduced to basic electronics circuitry followed by Arduino programming. Readers should design instruction that provides students with the opportunity for mastery experiences like breadboarding and programming success during instruction prior to an individual hands-on task. The instructional treatment should be extended in time to allow students more opportunity to process new knowledge. The hands-on activity should be simplified to include only one LED circuit, and the reference sheet should show more complete examples of programming. Students should be encouraged to work together on the hands-on activity rather than being left to work individually

Studies of extended planetary atmospheres

There was a theoretical study of physical and chemical processes in the stratosphere, later broadened to include the mesosphere. Particular emphasis was laid on testing of proposed height profiles of the eddy diffusion coefficient against observed tracer data. Eventually the effort shifted to study of ozone time series in satellite data, and interpretation in terms of aeronomical processes. Since all this work is computer-intensive, the first year of funding also contributed to the acquisition of a powerful minicomputer system, in collaboration with several other faculty members. This proved to be highly successful and cost effective

Real-Time Cavity QED with Single Atoms

The combination of cold atoms and large coherent coupling enables investigations in a new regime in cavity QED with single-atom trajectories monitored in real time with high signal-to-noise ratio. The underlying “vacuum-Rabi” splitting is clearly reflected in the frequency dependence of atomic transit signals recorded atom by atom, with evidence for mechanical light forces for intracavity photon number <1. The nonlinear optical response of one atom in a cavity is observed to be in accord with the one-atom quantum theory but at variance with semiclassical predictions