Lecturer: L. Pasquini (Associate Professor, DIFA)
Duration: 12 hours, 4 3-hour lectures in April and May
Venue: Laboratorio Didattico del secondo anno, V.le Berti-Pichat 6/2, Floor -1
Max 6 participants (due to covid restrictions); other 6 people can be connected online
PhD students can receive an Arduino board to work from home
Programme:
The lectures, a combination of theory and practice, will focus on data acquisition and signal generation techniques as well as on methods for the control of scientific instruments and apparatuses. Each lecture will start with an introductory part of about one hour, after which the students will work for a couple of hours on specific small projects either suggested by the teacher or selected by the students according to their research interests. The software used for the introductory part will be LabVIEW, which is freely available for installation on personal computer. For the projects, the students are free to use other software environments such as Python, C++, Matlab etc., provided they are familiar with it and have it installed. An ELVIS II device by National Instruments and a laptop will be available in each laboratory station. In addition, the students can receive an Arduino Uno board for their homework for the whole duration of the course.
The following topics will be discussed and put in practice either on ELVIS II or Arduino:
1) Synchronization between parallel processes; producer-consumer and master-slave architectures.
2) Techniques for triggered data acquisition.
3) Arbitrary waveform generation; use of digital lines and counters for pulse generation and frequency measurement
4) Control of feedback loops via the PID (Proportional-Integral-Derivative) method