Today I have been playing around with my new toy, the Moku:go.  It is a fun device which is like a chameleon or a Swiss army knife for your lab.  It is sweet!  It is a digital device that is light weight and small.  It can fit in a backpack.  And it has the ability to be an arbitrary waveform generator, oscilloscope, and more.  Today I focused on the waveform generator.

I have a student who is trying to construct a low cost oscillator controlled by a microcomputer for a speed of light measurement.  We are currently investigating using inexpensive electro-optics parts such as a diode lasers to build a sequence of mid-level physics experiments for students.  Not only to explore fundamental physics but also to further develop students skill sets in instrumentation and general optics skills.

I plugged the Moku:go into her diode laser setup and quickly measured 2.9 X 10⁸ m/s in a very short amount time.  It was great.  The smallest rise and fall times of pulses were around 16 ns which made the measurement fairly easy to do.  It was even easier to use than a function generator as the experimenter can change values on the graph you are trying to make on your computer.  It is going to be great for student learning.

I started playing around with controlling the beautiful thing with Matlab and Python.  Looking forward to doing more on Thursday.