Welcome to PHYS 371 at CCNY

This is the course page for City College Course PHYS 371, Advanced Physics Lab I, in the Fall 2025 semester

The course syllabus is here: Syllabus

The goal of this course is to learn how experimental physics works. You will have done some labs in your intro courses, but for the most part, those were well defined and structured, meaning you didn't have to design the experiments or build the apparatus. This course will challenge you to do both of those things. Don't worry, we won't expect you to build a particle accelerator or solve the world's energy crisis by inventing a method for cold fusion, but we'll work with the same techniques and tools that would enable more ambitions projects to be done.


Some basics

You received your Arduino Kits. Now you need to get them up and running.

Start here: Arduino Getting Started You'll want to install the IDE (integrated development environment ) version IDE 1.8.19 which lets you easily connect to the board and upload code to it. Everything usually just works, though on some machines there might be issues (drivers, etc). Get those sorted out now!

Course Schedule and Materials

The schedule is subject to change, but this represents the most likely dates for those items.

Date Class Topic In class Assignment Anything Due?
Sep 1
Sep 8 Intro & Kits
Sep 15 Measurements Slides
Sep 22
Sep 29 Devices Slides Lab 1
Oct 6 Output Slides
Oct 13
Oct 14 Slides Lab 2
Oct 20
Oct 27 FFT/Signals Slides Lab 3
Nov 3
Nov 10 Low Pass Filter Slides Lab 4
Nov 17
Nov 24 Lab 5 & Project Plan
Dec 1
Dec 8 Lab 6
Dec 15 Projects

Labs

  1. Lab 1: Unknown Resistor (Due Sep 29th, 4 pm)
  2. Lab 2: Thermometry (Due Oct 14th, 4 pm)
  3. Lab 3: Make a Heater (Due Oct 27th, 4 pm)
  4. Lab 4: Signal Detection (Due Nov 10th, 4 pm)
  5. Lab 5: Low Pass Filter (Due Nov 24th, 4 pm)
  6. Lab 6: Signal and Noise (Due Dec 8th, 4 pm)

Projects

Info sheet about the projects is here.

Tutorials and Guides

Here are some pages where I'll post various quick tips and tutorials to help out with the technical side of this class.

  1. Hardware Specific
    1. The Lab Kits
    2. Setting up your Arduino
    3. Breadboard Layout
  2. Software/Coding
    1. First steps for Python/Colab
    2. Basic Function Plotting with Python:
    3. Basic Data Importing with Python:
    4. Plot a rate of change (i.e. numerical derivative)
    5. Curves and Fitting:
    6. Plotting Two Data Sets with Python :
    7. Plotting Multiple Series on One Graph with Python :
    8. Basic FFT analysis for NYC temperature :
    9. Loading In Data
    10. Document Making
    11. General Software Topics
  3. Other
    1. General Rules
  4. References
    1. A Book: Physics Experiments with Arduino and Smartphones
    2. Arduino Language Reference
    3. Numpy Reference
    4. Matplotlib Reference

Other information

Physics page for Current Students

Communication

To comply with FERPA guidelines, please use your ccny email to correspond with me. Include your name and section number, and EMPLID if you need administrative actions done.