Data Acquisition For Physics With Arduino

Arduino is an open-source electronics microcontroller board that allows us to marry technology with our environment. There are countless modules commercially available that can be easily manipulated with programs written in the Arduino Integrated Development Environment (IDE), giving users full control of input and output. Several of these modules naturally relate to physics and data acquisition. Since physics analyses rely on data, the Arduino is a natural choice for a system where the user has full control of data collection methods. This poster will present our development of a data acquisition system that integrates equipment commonly found in physics laboratories. We will discuss the electronics and software aspects as well as the role of the system in enhancing student understanding of computer programming