Setup and Tools

We broke the setup of this lab into two stages: prototyping/testing and final device construction. For the prototyping stages, we used a standard medium-sized breadboard (5-pins per line, power and grounding rails), a metal filament resistor set, multilayer ceramic capacitors, and a standard wiring kit, including male-to-male jumper wires. In both stages, we chose our microcontroller to be an Arduino Duemilanove, running the Arduino Mega 328 processor (ATMEGA 328), with a clock speed of 20MHz \cite{wikipedia}. The benefit of the Arduino over our other microcontroller option, the Raspberry Pi, comes from the Arduino not being a complete "desktop" computer, but rather a special purpose microprocessor for collecting data/running procedures in a loop. As a result, we need minimal setup to get the device to operate correctly, and we can output the data collected to a serial port on a desktop PC using certain software. For testing, we also utilized a number of non-circuitry components, including a non-static foam, thin copper plating, and thermal resistive tape, which we used to create a basic oscillating system and open capacitor plates. For the final product, our non-circuitry components included a brass "known mass", which operates as our known, charged mass in the oscillating system, two cut copper plates for capacitor plates, and another set of non-static foam. For both sections, we used a standard soldering iron, which we shared with the other groups in lab.