EN123: Themes, Syllabus

Welcome to EN123, a required course for Bioengineering concentrators. You'll get a chance to design hardware and software solutions to a series of Lab challenges, many with a bio-orientation. You should come out of EN123 feeling confident that you can acquire and analyze data in a biological lab setting, and contribute to biomedical research. Because "design" is in the title of the course, you will have opportunities to design circuits, instruments, experiments, and software.

¶ While bio-instrumentation is a subset of instrumentation, and there are general principles involved, we will make an effort to reference how animals sense temperature, measure muscle force, etc, and how human neuromuscular performance can be measured.

Instrumentation Themes:
    Design: meeting specs with engineering trade-offs
    Transducers
        Sensors: transduce from various energy sources to VOLTAGE
             thermistors, strain gauges, phototransistors, skin electrodes...
        Biological vs man-made sensors
        Actuators: Convert electrical signal to mechanical or thermal energy
    Amplifiers
    Electrical Safety: Physiological Effect of Current on the Heart    
    Filtering out noise
    Sampling Theorem
    DAQ: data acquistion hardware: Analog to Digital conversion
    Software & virtual instruments: LabVIEW
   Data Analysis: FFT spectrum analysis, Statistical data analysis: Hypothesis testing.
   Automatic Control: Virtues of negative feedback
   Rotating machinery as tachometer or motor

¶ The 123 website is created with Dreamweaver, with various graphics in the form of JPG images, and Fireworks, Interleaf or Adobe Illustrator files. Equations are set with MathType 5.2.

¶ What's not in EN123:
No final exam
No midterm
No problem sets
No lab reports
No textbook to buy
no cheating! and
No Partial Credit.

¶ Contract Grading.
Details of the grading contract are accessed from a link on the Site Index. Basically, the requirements for C, B, A and A+ are spelled out in advance. Each grade level involves completing various Labs and Quizzes. In meeting the requirements for a lab you will need to answer an oral question about the function of your circuit or software (FTQ=fault tolerance question). Your rate of progress in EN123 might depend somewhat on how well you work with your lab partner. In 2005 we start our experiment with Labzilla, a method for limiting the number of A's in the course to 2/3 of the students.

Prerequisites:
The ideal prereq is EN52, Circuits. If you haven't had EN52 I can get you up to speed on circuits with a series of help sessions. (normally Tu Th 10a.m. in September) I taught EN51 and EN52 a couple times in the 90's, and can draw your attention to the limited number of concepts you'll need to make good progress in EN123.

Otherwise, there are no particular Bio or CS requirements for EN123: the course is fairly self-contained.

What you should know from Basic Electricity:
(and what will be reviewed in the help sessions)
Ohm's Law
Definitions of resistance, voltage, current
Current flow through by ions through membrane channels
Current-voltage characteristic of a diode
    full wave rectifier
Transistor as a switch: emitter follower circuit
Effect of temperature on resistance: metals vs insulators
Voltage dividers, current dividers
Wheatstone bridge
Definition of capacitance
    frequency-dependent impedance of a capacitor
    energy stored in a capacitor
Power = voltage X current
How impedance is different from resistance
Time constant of RC circuit
Sinusoidal analysis
LP and HP filters with RC circuits
Kirchoff's Current Law
Use of Laplace transform for solving circuit node voltages
    Node admittance matrix
Faraday's Law
How a transformer works
    Power supply = transformer + rectifier + LP filter + regulator
Lorentz force Law

Syllabus: (and see scorecard)
Principles of instrumentation design: meeting specifications
Sensitivity (gain) vs range of a sensor
Sensors for electromagnetic radiation (light)
Amplifiers: op amp circuits
LabVIEW DAQ software, and NI DAQ card specs
Electrical safety, ground, shielding and noise
Design of LP and HP VCVS filters
Combining LP and HP filters for bandpass and band-reject filters
Temperature sensors: thermistors, thermocouples.
Strain gauges
Analog-to-digital conversion
Sampling Theorem
Hypothesis testing: statistical analysis of data
Electrodes for recording from tissue: EMG
Negative Feedback and Automatic Control
Rotating machinery: motors, generators and electrical braking
Motor torque-speed curve compared to Tension-Velocity curves of muscle
Generators as tachometers
Wireless telemetry: 900MHz transmitters and receivers
and see 36 Things to Remember about Instrumentation