Standard lab equipment - links to help
The following links may help students. Links worked in 2014-08
Multimeters - voltage and current measurements
Problem - students use multimeters but they think that just turning the knob will magically switch the circuit between correctly measuring current in the circuit or the voltage drop across a piece of the circuit. However, the placement of the multimeter in the circuit must also change.
Current - ammeter - (flow) - in series - must be in a position where all the current is flowing through the ammeter - it will not see what is not 'flowing' through it.
Voltage - voltmeter - (relative potential drop) - in parallel - must be in position set up in parallel across the place where the potential drop is measured.
Here are two youtube videos that might help. There are plenty others that are useful.
Measure voltage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZX3MyBkMvA
Measure current
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lwZkl0yBqA
Oscilloscopes
Problem - students have varying expertise with oscilloscopes.
BTCInstrumentation has a set of demonstration videos that appear at a nice level for Phys 374 students. The first one is below - the others in the sequence can be found searching on "BTCinstrumentation oscilloscope"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFqxn6VGYC0
The following site (a distributor of used and new lab electronics) has pdf copies available of the great Tektronix how-tos. These may be a bit intimidating to a student who has never used an oscilloscope, but after the videos above, or a bit of experimenting on an oscilloscope, these XYZ of oscilloscopes will take a student to the next level.
http://www.testequity.com/static/86/
Thermocouples and temperature measurement
Problem - measuring temperature accurately is actually a much harder problem than it might initially occur. In several of the experiments, we use thermocouples (a common method to monitor temperature) but students have had little experience with temperature measurement beyond a household thermometer.
The follow site (Omega) has a practical introduction on thermocouples, as well as other literature on other common methods (resistance thermometer, etc) to measure temperature of samples and systems during experiments and the physics behind them.
Omega