The use of microcomputers in an undergraduate acoustics laboratory

Microcomputers are used in the laboratory as a tool to collect, store, analyze, and graph data from acoustics experiments. Emphasis is placed on teaching the physics involved from individual experiments and not on particular features of the computer. These microstations allow students to record data from the experimental apparatus using the computer. Simple menued software instructions are available to organize the collection of data for printout or for X‐Y pairs to be plotted and labeled. Students can also scale their data and store or plot these variations. This laboratory facility speeds up the tedious and routine data taking chores of the experiment and frees up time for discussion of the physics. In many cases time allows the student a chance to try a few things on his own. Simple acoustics experiments will be shown involving transient vibration and Fourier analysis using our mini‐computer station. This station has a 6502 microprocessor, a two‐channel analog to digital plug‐in board, a disk drive, mo...