Due Tuesday, Jan 30.

Reading Material: Make sure you're familiar with H&H 1.12-1.22. This may sound trivial, but it really is important to have a good intuition and practical feel for how inductors and capacitors work in circuits. Also, if you're rusty (or never had a good intro) on Op-Amps, skim thru ch. 4, paying particular attention to inverting & non-inverting amplifiers, active rectifier circuits, gain-bandwith limitations, and single supply op-amps. These are all topics that are relevant to designing good sensor circuitry.

Optional Reading: The handout in the lab on resonant circuits. You don't need to solve any differential equations for this class though. (in fact, if you spend a bunch of time doing this instead of building real circuits, the performance of the car will probably suffer. Trial and error will get you better results in a fraction of the time. Welcome to engineering in the real world :)

Sensors: The two obvious options are optical and magnetic field sensors. Field sensors are recommended for robustness issues, as discussed in class. If you want to try optical, let me know and we can alter the assignment below accordingly.

Assignment: Do mathematical simulations to figure out where you want to place your sensors. This is to give you a rough idea of the effects of placement, you can always move them later if you decide something else is better. Use excel, matlab, or your favorite computational program to generate plots of signal amplitude vs. distance from wire for various orientations and heights off the ground. Post these plots to the web page in the file /afs/ir/group/natcar/WWW/data/sensor.html