Tag: tutorial

Making 3D Plots in OriginLab OriginPro

When I first wanted to use OriginPro to make 3D plots for my Raman and photoluminescence data I struggled to find a solution for little problems for hours. It was not like I had no one to consult, but I wanted to figure it out myself because the same philosophy with learning things previously has helped me immensely in learning things with authority and developing my own characteristic style, by putting in an extra amount of time and hard work.

Check with your university, there’s a big chance that they offer you students a free copy of OriginPro. It is an amazing piece of software, easy to learn and can make plots beautiful enough to be published in Science or Nature.

However when I was toiling through things, I also wished someone who had gone through the same thing could have documented it somewhere. Not surprisingly, no one had. So I wanted to. Here it goes.

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A Layman’s Guide to Photonic Crystals

The first time I heard the word “Photonic Crystal” in a seminar, I was stumped. So I decided to read about it, understand and then write about it to make it explain better to me, and you of course. Even though it is a whole graduate level class to explain, it does not hurt to quickly look at how Photonic crystals work. I have not taken the relevant graduate class. However, after reading this amazing answer on Quora, and from a range of other literature out there, I was able to make some good sense out of it. My idea was that at least by doing a little reading you get to throw around a fancy word like “photonic crystal”. Moreover, if someone decides to test you on what it means, you even explain it to them. These kind of examinations, where it is incumbent upon you to perform well, happen all the time, everywhere. That’s why it is important to learn. And well, then there’s that whole argument of expanding your mind to exercise your creative muscle by reading and listening carefully to things and people that are out of what you do.

Featured image credit: Flickr, Steven & Courtney Johnson & Horwitz (Picture)

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Gravity Explained

By Anupum Pant

I’m always amazed by how teachers all around the world come up with fantastic ideas to make science easier for kids. A couple of months back we saw a video of Dan Burns using a trampoline to explain the space-time warping at a Physics Teacher SOS workshop in Los Gatos High School. In fact there is even a place on the web where you can learn it to do yourself [here].

Another explanation which came around much later just takes the cake. EdwardCurrent uses a “space-time stretcher” to demonstrate how gravity, well, stretches the space-time fabric. Moreover, the material he uses to construct this teaching aid comes mostly amongst all the old stuff lying in his garage.

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Seeing Your Own Eye Blood Vessels

By Anupum Pant

Blind spots are fine and I’ve known for years how to spot your own blind spot. You can make 2 spots on a paper separated by 4-5 inches, close your right eye and look at the right side spot with your left eye. If you do that and move forward or backward ( and rest at about 15 inches from the surface you drew on), you’d find a point where your left eye’s peripheral vision would not render the left side spot. You’d have found your blind spot.

But there is something more interesting, I never knew. You can actually see the blood vessels of your eye, with your own eye. Here’s how…

Take a sheet of paper (or card), and poke a pin hole in it. Then close one eye and holding paper close to your eye, jerk around the paper in little circles. At the same time, make sure you are looking at a bright white area through that hole. You could open up MS paint, make the whole canvas white and stare at it through the hole. Try to focus on the white screen and not the paper (or card)…

The video probably explains it better.

It’s So Easy To Make A Speaker At Home!

By Anupum Pant

While doing a random experiment with the ordinary motor, a youtuber Andy Elliott who runs the channel mist8k (known for his awesome videos) mistakenly touched the 3.5 mm jack of a speaker cable to the motor’s wires.

This resulted in something very interesting. The sound being transmitted through the cable started coming from the motor. And consequently, he invented the very basic speaker. Then he made a video of him explaining how to make a speaker at home using just a copper wire, magnet, tape, jacks and a disposable plastic cup.

I first saw this on Gizmodo and I thought it deserved a mention in the engineering section of this blog. I can’t wait to try it myself and probably improve the “very basic speaker” to make a nice iPod dock in the future…

Here is what he does –

  • Uncoils a copper wire from a component of an old PC, turns it into a small circular coil of the size of the circular magnet and then tapes it to the back of a disposable plastic cup.
  • Then, makes a larger coil by winding it around a bottle cap and tapes it on top of the smaller coil.
  • Connects one end of the larger coil to the tip of the 3.5 mm jack and the other end of the coil to the base of the jack. The other end of this wire having the 3.5 mm jack is also a 3.5 mm jack, which goes into the computer’s (or any player’s) speaker plug.
  • Places a strong neodymium magnet on top of the coils and plays the music. That’s it!

The computer turns the sound signal into an electric current. This current flows into the jack and then into the coil. Thus, the coil produces a magnetic field of its own. This varying magnetic field coupled with the static magnetic field of the neodymium magnet makes the coil move. Which in turn moves the back of the cup (as it’s taped on it) and makes the air vibrate. As a result, sound is created.

Here’s the video where he teaches how to do it…