Tutorial

Read more about the article Publish an Open Source app on Fdroid

Publish an Open Source app on Fdroid

Fdroid is a famous software repository hosted with numerous free and open source Android apps. They have a main repository where they allow developers hosting free and ad free software after a thorough check up on the app. This blog will tell you how to get your project hosted in their repository using steps I followed to publish the PSLab Android app.

Before you get started, make sure you have the consent from your developer community to publish their app on Fdroid. Fdroid requires your app to use all kind of open resources to implement features. If there is any closed source libraries in your app and you still want to publish it on Fdroid, you may have to reimplement that feature by any other mean without using closed source resources. They will also not allow to have Google’s proprietary “play-services” in your app along with proprietary ad services. You can find the complete inclusion policy document from their official page.

When your app is fully ready, you can get started with the inclusion procedure. Unlike how we are publishing apps on Google Play, publishing an app on Fdroid is as simple as sending a pull request to their main repository. That’s exactly what we have to do. In simple terms all we have to do is:

  1. Fork the Fdroid main data repository
  2. Make changes to their files to include our app
  3. Do a pull request

First of all you need a GitLab account as the Fdroid repository is hosted in GitLab. Once you are ready with a GitLab account, fork and clone the f-droid-data repository. The next step is to install the fdroid-server. This can be simply done using apt:

$ sudo apt install fdroidserver

 
Once that is done, go into the directory where you cloned the repository and run the following command to check if the initiation is complete.

$ fdroid init

 
Then run the following command to read current meta data where it saves all the information related to existing apps on Fdroid;

$ fdroid readmeta

 
This will list out various details about the current meta files. Next step is to add our app details into this meta file. This can be done easily using following command or you can manually create folders and files. But the following is safer;

$ fdroid import --url https://github.com/fossasia/pslab-android --subdir app

 
Replace the link to repository from the –url tag in the above command. For instance the following will be the link for fossasia-phimpme android;

$ fdroid import --url https://github.com/fossasia/phimpme-android --subdir app

 
This will create a file named as “org.fossasia.pslab” in the metadata directory. Open up this text file and we have to fill in our details.

  1. Categories
  2. License
  3. Web Site
  4. Summary
  5. Description

Description needs to be terminated with a newline and a dot to avoid build failures.

Once the file is filled up, run the following command to make sure that the metadata file is complete.

$ fdroid readmeta

 
Then run the following command to clean up the file

$ fdroid rewritemeta org.fossasia.pslab

 
We can automatically add version details using the following command:

$ fdroid checkupdates org.fossasia.pslab

 
Now run the lint test to see if the app is building correctly.

$ fdroid lint org.fossasia.pslab

 
If there are any errors thrown, fix them to get to the next step where we actually build the app:

$ fdroid build -v -l org.fossasia.pslab

 
Now you are ready to make the pull request which will then get reviewed by developers in Fdroid community to get it merged into their main branch. Make a commit and then push to your fork. From there it is pretty straightforward to make a pull request to the main repository. Once that is done, they will test the app for any insecurities. If all of them are passed, the app will be available in Fdroid!

Reference:

  1. Quick Start: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/blob/master/README.md#quickstart
  2. Making merge requests: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#merge-requests

Continue ReadingPublish an Open Source app on Fdroid
Read more about the article Creating Logos for PSLab with KiCAD

Creating Logos for PSLab with KiCAD

We can make plenty of PCB designs using KiCAD, a powerful open source CAD tool. What makes them unique is customized logos and brand names. KiCAD offers us a feature to add logos in any of the silk screens; bottom or top. Rather than just a textual logos, a graphical logo makes the design look more unique just like the PSLab v5 revision.

The process is not a tedious task. We can simply start by getting the logo we want to add in the PCB silk screen. Just to make it more clear, silk screen is a paint made on top of the circuit board with all the markings and labels with a special ink. It will be either white or black according to user preference. As the first step, open the logo image file with inkscape.

We need to pre-process the image before we move onto KiCAD development space. The silk screen will have a black and white image as the input. It will convert all the black parts to invisible and white parts visible in the silk screen color. In that sense we have to color transform any logo into following format to get the desired output.

Once the logo image is ready, open KiCAD and from it’s toolbar;

Click and open “Bitmap2Component” icon which is similar to a “simple a”. This will open a window where you can import the logo image in png format.

In this figure, image height and width is massive. It is always a good practice to have a large image and then scale it down to prevent any detail losses. If the image is too big, from the “Resolution” section, try increasing the DPI value and observe the dimensions are shrinking. You can have a ruler and measure the actual size of the image you want and then adjust the DPI values to get the desired dimensions. In my case I had to use 2500×3000 DPI to get an image of 20mmx7mm,

The next step is to export the logo file. Click on the “Export” button and select the location to your custom component library and save the file in “kicad_mod” format.

Now open up “Pcbnew” layout where the PCB design is. From the toolbar to your right, click on the “Add footprint” icon.

A dialog box will pop up to select the component. Click on the button “Select by Browser” to get a more interactive selection menu or you can simply type the name if you remember it correctly.

From the component browser, browse to the library where you saved the kicad_mod file and import it to the layout. The final result will look like this. If the dimensions are not what you wanted, simply follow the previous steps again to increase the DPI values to get the correct dimensions. By pressing “f” you can flip the silk screen side, bottom or top to place the logo where ever you want.

Reference:

KiCAD Documentation: http://kicad-pcb.org/help/documentation/

Continue ReadingCreating Logos for PSLab with KiCAD
Read more about the article Implementing Clickable Images

Implementing Clickable Images

PSLab Android application is a feature rich compact app to user interface the PSLab hardware device. Similarly the PSLab device itself is a compact device with a plenty of features to replace almost all the analytical instruments in a school science lab. When a first time user takes the device and connect it with the Android app, there are so many pins labeled with abbreviations. This creates lots of complications unless the user checks the pinout diagram separately.

As a workaround a UI is proposed to integrate a layout containing the PSLab PCB image where user can click on each pin to get a dialog box explaining him what that specific pin is and what it does. This implementation can be done it two ways;

  • Using an Image map
  • Using (x,y) coordinates

The first implementation is more practical and can be applied with any device with any dimension. The latter requires some transformation to capture the correct position when user has clicked on a pin. So the first method will be implemented.

The idea behind using an image map is to have two images with exact dimensions on top of each other. The topmost image will be the color map which we create ourselves using unique colors at unique heat points. This image will have the visibility setting invisible as the main idea is to let the  user see a meaningful image and capture the positions using a secondary in the back end.

To make things much clear, let’s have a look at a color map image I am suggesting here for a general case.

If we overlap the color map with the PSLab layout, we will be able to detect where user has clicked using Android onTouchEvent.

@Override
public boolean onTouchEvent(MotionEvent ev) {
   final int action = ev.getAction();
   final int evX = (int) ev.getX();
   final int evY = (int) ev.getY();
   switch (action) {
       case MotionEvent.ACTION_UP :
         int touchColor = getHotspotColor (R.id.backgroundMap, evX, evY);
         /* Display the relevant pin description dialog box here */
         break;
   }
   return true;
}

 
Color of the clicked position can be captured using the following code;

public int getHotspotColor (int hotspotId, int x, int y) {
   ImageView img = (ImageView) findViewById (hotspotId);
   img.setDrawingCacheEnabled(true);
   Bitmap hotspots = Bitmap.createBitmap(img.getDrawingCache());
   img.setDrawingCacheEnabled(false);
   return hotspots.getPixel(x, y);
}

 
If we go into details, from the onTouchEvent we capture the (x,y) coordinates related to user click. Then this location is looked up for a unique color by creating a temporary bitmap and then getting the pixel value at the captured coordinate.

There is an error in this method as the height parameter always have an offset. This offset is introduced by the status bar and the action bar of the application. If we use this method directly, there will be an exception thrown out saying image height is less than the height defined by y.

Solving this issue involves calculating status bar and actionbar heights separately and then subtract them from the y coordinate.

Actionbar and status bar heights can be calculated as follows;

Rect rectangle = new Rect();
Window window = getWindow();
window.getDecorView().getWindowVisibleDisplayFrame(rectangle);
int statusBarHeight = rectangle.top;
int contentViewTop = window.findViewById(Window.ID_ANDROID_CONTENT).getTop();
int titleBarHeight= contentViewTop - statusBarHeight;

 
Using them, we can modify the captured coordinates as follows;

int touchColor = getHotspotColor (R.id.imageArea, evX, evY - statusBarHeight);

 
This way the exception is handled by adjusting the cursor position. Once this is done, it is all about displaying the correct pin description dialog box.

Reference:

Calculate status bar height: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3407256/height-of-status-bar-in-android

Continue ReadingImplementing Clickable Images
Read more about the article Making Shapes with PSLab Oscilloscope

Making Shapes with PSLab Oscilloscope

Looking back to history, the first ever video game was ‘Pong’ which was played on an analog oscilloscope with a very small screen. Oscilloscopes are not made to play video games, but by just tinkering around its basic functionality which is display waveforms, we can do plenty of cool things. PSLab device also has an oscilloscope; in fact it’s a four channel oscilloscope.

This blog post will show you how the oscilloscope in PSLab is not just a cheap oscilloscope but it has lots of functionalities an industry grade oscilloscope has (except for the bandwidth limitation to a maximum of 2 MHz)

To produce shapes like above figures, we are using another instrument available in PSLab. That is ‘Waveform Generator’. PSLab Waveform Generator can generate three different waveforms namely Sine waves, Triangular waves and Square waves ranging from 5 Hz to 5 kHz.

To get started, first connect two jumper wires between SI1-CH1 and SI2-CH2 pins. We needn’t worry about ground pins as they are already internally connected. Now it’s time to open up the PSLab oscilloscope. Here we are going to utilize two channels for this activity and they will be CH1 and CH2. Check the tick boxes in front of ‘Chan 1’ and ‘Chan 2’ and set ‘Range’ to “+/-4V” to have the maximum visibility filling the whole screen with the waveform.

The shapes are drawn using a special mode called ‘X-Y Mode’ in PSLab oscilloscope. In this mode, two channels will be plotted against their amplitudes at every point in time.

As it is already mentioned that PSLab can generate many waveform types and also they can have different phase angles relative to each other. They can have different independent frequencies. With all these combinations, we can tweak the settings in Waveform Generator to produce different cool shapes in PSLab oscilloscope.

These shapes can vary from basic geometric shapes such as circle, square, rectangle to complicated shapes such as rhombus, ellipse and polynomial curves.

Circle

A circular shape can be made by generating two sine waves having the same frequency but with a phase difference of 90 degrees or 270 degrees between the two wave forms.

 

 
 

 

Square

Square shape can be made by generating two triangular waveforms again having the same frequency but with a phase difference of either 90 degrees or 270 degrees between the two.

 

 

 
 

Rectangle

Similar to creating a Square, by having the same frequency for both triangular waveforms but a different phase angle greater than or less than 90 degree will do the trick.

 

 

 
 

Rhombus

Keeping the waveform settings same for the rectangle, by changing the amplitude of the SI1 waveform using the knob we can generate a rhombic shape on the XY graph plot.

 

 

 
 

Ellipse

Generating ellipse is also similar to creating a rhombus. But here we are using sine waves instead of triangular waves. By changing the amplitude of SI1 using the knob we can change the curvature.

 

 

 

Helix

Helix or spiral shape can be generated using two sine waves having same phase but two different frequencies. Frequencies better be integer multiples of the smaller frequency to  have a steady shape.

 

 

 

Parabola

Parabolic shapes can be generated by mixing up triangular waves with sine waves with different phase angles.

 

 

 

 
 

More random shapes


References:

https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200810/physicshistory.cfm

Continue ReadingMaking Shapes with PSLab Oscilloscope
Read more about the article How to get a cost effective PCB for Production

How to get a cost effective PCB for Production

Designing a PCB for a DIY project involves in making up the schematics which then turned into a PCB layout. Components used in these PCBs will be mostly “Through Hole” which are commonly available in the market. Once the PCB is printed in either screen printing techniques or using photo resistive dry films, making alterations to the component mounting pads and connections will be somewhat possible.

When dealing with a professional PCB design, there are many properties we need to consider. DIY PCBs will simply be single sided in most cases. A professional printed circuit board will most likely to have more than one layer. The PCB for PSLab device has 4 layers. Adding more layers to a PCB design makes it easier to draw connections. But on the other hand, the cost will increase exponentially. The designer must try to optimize the design to have less layers as much as possible. The following table shows the estimated cost for printing for 10 PSLab devices if the device had that many layers.

One Layer Two Layers Four Layers Six Layers
$4.90 $4.90 $49.90 $305.92

Once the layer levels increase from 2, the other layers will be inner layers. The effective area of inner layers will be reduced if the designer adds more through hole components or vias which connects a connection from a one layer with a connection with another layer. The components used will then be limited to surface mount components.

Surface Mount components (SMD) are expensive compared to their Through Hole (TH) counterpart. But the smaller size of SMD makes it easier to place many components in a smaller area than to Through Hole components. Soldering and assembling Through Hole components can be done manually using hand soldering techniques. SMD components need special tools and soldering equipments to assemble and solder them. Much more precision is required when SMD components are soldered. Hence automated assembly is used in industry where robot arms are used to place components and reflow soldering techniques to solder the SMD components. This emphasizes that the number of SMD components used in the PCB will increase the assembly cost as well as the component cost but it will greatly reduce the size of the PCB.

SMD components comes in different packages. Passive components such as resistors, capacitors will come in 0.25 mm upto 7.4mm dimensions. PSLab device uses 0805/2012 sized package which is easier to find in the market and big enough to pick and assemble by hand. The packaging refers to its dimensions. 0805 reads as 0.08 inches long and 0.05 inches wide.

Finding the components in the market is the next challenging task. We can easily purchase components from an online store but the price will be pretty high. If the design can spare some space, it will be wise to have alternative pads for a Through Hole component for the SMD component as Through Hole components can be found much easier than SMD components in a local store.

The following image is taken from Sparkfun which illustrates different common IC packages. Selecting the correct footprint for the SMD IC and vise versa is very important. It is a good practice to check the stores for the availability and prices for the components before finalizing the PCB design with footprints and sending it to printing. We may find some ICs are not available for immediate purchase as the stocks ran out but a different package of the same IC is available. Then the designer can alter the foot print to the packaging and use the more common packaging type in the design.

Considering all the factors above, a cost effective PCB can be designed and manufactured once the design is optimized to have the minimum number of layers with components with the minimum cost for both assembly and components.

Resources:

Continue ReadingHow to get a cost effective PCB for Production
Read more about the article Creating Bill of Materials for PSLab using KiCAD

Creating Bill of Materials for PSLab using KiCAD

PSLab device consists of a hundreds of electronic components. Resistors, diodes, transistors, integrated circuits are to name a few. These components are of two types; Through hole and surface mounted.

Surface mount components (SMD) are smaller in size. Due to this reason, it is hard to hand solder these components onto a printed circuit board. We use wave soldering or reflow soldering to connect them with a circuit.

Through Hole components (TH) are fairly larger than their SMD counter part. They are made bigger to make it easy for hand soldering. These components can also be soldered using wave soldering.

Once a PCB has completed its design, the next step is to manufacture it with the help of a PCB manufacturer. They will require the circuit design in “gerber” format along with its Bill of Materials (BoM) for assembly. The common requirement of BoM is the file in a csv format. Some manufacturers will require the file in xml format. There are many plugins available in KiCAD which does the job.

KiCAD when first installed, doesn’t come configured with a BoM generation tool. But there are many scripts developed with python available online free of charge. KiBoM is one of the famous plugins available for the task.

Go to “Eeschema” editor in KiCAD where the schematic is present and then click on the “BoM” icon in the menu bar. This will open a dialog box to select which plugin to use to generate the bill of materials.

Initially there won’t be any plugins available in the “Plugins” section. As we are adding plugins to it, they will be listed down so that we can select which plugin we need. To add a plugin, click on the “Add Plugin” button to open the dialog box to browse to the specific plugin we have already downloaded. There are a set of available plugins in the KiCAD installation directory.

The path is most probably will be (unless you have made any changes to the installation);

usr/lib/kicad/plugins

Once a plugin is selected, click on “Generate” button to generate the bom file. “Plugin Info” will display where the file was made and it’s name.

Make sure we have made the BoM file compatible to the file required by the manufacturer. That is; removed all the extra content and added necessary details such as manufacturer’s part numbers and references replacing the auto generated part numbers.

Resources:

Continue ReadingCreating Bill of Materials for PSLab using KiCAD
Read more about the article Creating an Installer for PSLab Desktop App

Creating an Installer for PSLab Desktop App

PSLab device is made useful with applications running on two platforms. One is Android and the other one is a desktop application developed using Python frameworks. Desktop application uses half a dozen of dependent libraries and they are required to be installed prior to installing the application itself.

For someone with zero or less knowledge on how to install packages in a Linux environment, this task will be quite difficult. To ease up the process of installing the desktop application in a computer, we can use a script to run specific commands which will install the dependencies and the application.

Dependencies required by PSLab  Desktop app

  • PyQt 4.7
  • Python 2.6, 2.7 or 3.x
  • NumPy, Scipy
  • pyqt4-dev-tools
  • Pyqtgraph
  • pyopengl and qt-opengl
  • iPython-qtconsole

These dependencies can be made installed using a bash script running with root permission. A bash script will have the file extension “.sh” and a header line;

#!/bin/bash

A bash script needs to be made executable by the user himself. To do this, user needs to type a one line command in the terminal as follows and enter his password;

sudo chmod +x <Name_of_the_script>.sh

The keyword “sudo” interprets as “Super User DO” and the line follows will be executed with root permission. In other words with administrative privileges to modify system settings such as copying content to system folders.

The keyword “chmod” stands for “Change Mode” which will alter the mode of a file. In current context, the file is made executable by adding the executable property to the bash script using “+x” syntax.

Once the script is made executable, it can be executed using;

sudo ./<Name_of_the_script>.sh

An installer can be made attractive by using different colors rather than the plain old text outputs. For this purpose we can use color syntax in bash script. They are represented using ANSI escape codes and following is a list of commonly used colors;

Black        0;30     Dark Gray     1;30
Red          0;31     Light Red     1;31
Green        0;32     Light Green   1;32
Brown/Orange 0;33     Yellow        1;33
Blue         0;34     Light Blue    1;34
Purple       0;35     Light Purple  1;35
Cyan         0;36     Light Cyan    1;36
Light Gray   0;37     White         1;37

As in any programming language, rather than using the same line in many places, we can define variables in a bash script. The syntax will be the variable name followed by an equal sign with the value. There cannot be spaces around the equal sign or it will generate an error.

GREEN='\033[0;32m'

These variables can be accessed using a special syntax as follows;

${GREEN}

Finally we can output a message to the console using the “echo” command

echo -e "${GREEN}Welcome to PSLab Desktop app installer${NOCOLOR}"

Note that the keyword “-e” is used to enable interpretation of the following backslash escapes.

In order to install the packages and libraries, we use two package management tools. One is “apt” which stands for “Advanced Packaging Tool” and the second is “pip” which is used to download python related packages from “Python Package Index”. The following two lines illustrates how the two commands can be accessed.

apt-get install python-pip python-dev build-essential -y


pip install pyqtgraph

The keyword “-y” avoids the confirmation prompt in console to allow installation by pressing “Y” key every time it installs a package from “apt”.

Resources:

Continue ReadingCreating an Installer for PSLab Desktop App
Read more about the article Enabling Google App Signing for Android Project

Enabling Google App Signing for Android Project

Signing key management of Android Apps is a hectic procedure and can grow out of hand rather quickly for large organizations with several independent projects. We, at FOSSASIA also had to face similar difficulties in management of individual keys by project maintainers and wanted to gather all these Android Projects under singular key management platform:

To handle the complexities and security aspect of the process, this year Google announced App Signing optional program where Google takes your existing key’s encrypted file and stores it on their servers and asks you to create a new upload key which will be used to sign further updates of the app. It takes the certificates of your new upload key and maps it to the managed private key. Now, whenever there is a new upload of the app, it’s signing certificate is matched with the upload key certificate and after verification, the app is signed by the original private key on the server itself and delivered to the user. The advantage comes where you lose your key, its password or it is compromised. Before App Signing program, if your key got lost, you had to launch your app under a new package name, losing your existing user base. With Google managing your key, if you lose your upload key, then the account owner can request Google to reassign a new upload key as the private key is secure on their servers.

There is no difference in the delivered app from the previous one as it is still finally signed by the original private key as it was before, except that Google also optimizes the app by splitting it into multiple APKs according to hardware, demographic and other factors, resulting in a much smaller app! This blog will take you through the steps in how to enable the program for existing and new apps. A bit of a warning though, for security reasons, opting in the program is permanent and once you do it, it is not possible to back out, so think it through before committing.

For existing apps:

First you need to go to the particular app’s detail section and then into Release Management > App Releases. There you would see the Get Started button for App Signing.

The account owner must first agree to its terms and conditions and once it’s done, a page like this will be presented with information about app signing infrastructure at top.

So, as per the instructions, download the PEPK jar file to encrypt your private key. For this process, you need to have your existing private key and its alias and password. It is fine if you don’t know the key password but store password is needed to generate the encrypted file. Then execute this command in the terminal as written in Step 2 of your Play console:

java -jar pepk.jar –keystore={{keystore_path}} –alias={{alias}} –output={{encrypted_file_output_path}} –encryptionkey=eb10fe8f7c7c9df715022017b00c6471f8ba8170b13049a11e6c09ffe3056a104a3bbe4ac5a955f4ba4fe93fc8cef27558a3eb9d2a529a2092761fb833b656cd48b9de6a

You will have to change the bold text inside curly braces to the correct keystore path, alias and the output file path you want respectively.

Note: The encryption key has been same for me for 3 different Play Store accounts, but might be different for you. So please confirm in Play console first

When you execute the command, it will ask you for the keystore password, and once you enter it, the encrypted file will be generated on the path you specified. You can upload it using the button on console.

After this, you’ll need to generate a new upload key. You can do this using several methods listed here, but for demonstration we’ll be using command line to do so:

keytool -genkey -v -keystore {{keystore_path}} -alias {{alias_name}} -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -validity 10000

The command will ask you a couple of questions related to the passwords and signing information and then the key will be generated. This will be your public key and be used for further signing of your apps. So keep it and the password secure and handy (even if it is expendable now).

After this step, you need to create a PEM upload certificate for this key, and in order to do so, execute this command:

keytool -export -rfc -keystore {{keystore_path}} -alias {{alias_name}} -file {{upload_certificate.pem}}

After this is executed, it’ll ask you the keystore password, and once you enter it, the PEM file will be generated and you will have to upload it to the Play console.

If everything goes right, your Play console will look something like this:

 

Click enrol and you’re done! Now you can go to App Signing section of the Release Management console and see your app signing and new upload key certificates

 

You can use the SHA1 hash to confirm the keys as to which one corresponds to private and upload if ever in confusion.

For new apps:

For new apps, the process is like a walk in park. You just need to enable the App Signing, and you’ll get an option to continue, opt-out or re-use existing key.

 

If you re-use existing key, the process is finished then and there and an existing key is deployed as the upload key for this app. But if you choose to Continue, then App Signing will be enabled and Google will use an arbitrary key as private key for the app and the first app you upload will get its key registered as the upload key

 

This is the screenshot of the App Signing console when there is no first app uploaded and you can see that it still has an app signing certificate of a key which you did not upload or have access to.

If you want to know more about app signing program, check out these links:

Continue ReadingEnabling Google App Signing for Android Project
Read more about the article Understanding PN Junctions with the Pocket Science Lab

Understanding PN Junctions with the Pocket Science Lab

The boundary layer between two thin films of a semiconducting material with Positive type and Negative type doping is referred to as a P-N junction, and these are one of the fundamental building blocks of electronics. These junctions exhibit various properties that have given them a rather indispensable status in modern day electronics.

The PSLab’s various measurement tools enable us to understand these devices, and in this blog post we shall explain some uses of PN junctions, and visualize their behaviour with the PSLab.

One might easily be confused and assume that a positive doping implies that the layer has a net positive charge, but this is not the case. A positive doping involves replacing a minute quantity of the semiconductor molecules with atoms from the next column in the periodic table. These atoms such as phosphorus are also charge neutral, but the number of available mobile charge carriers effectively increases.

A diode as a half-wave rectifier

A diode is basically just a PN junction. An ideal diode conducts electricity in one direction offering a path of zero resistance, and it is a perfect insulator in the other direction. In practice, we may observe some additional properties.

Figure : The circuit used for making the half-wave rectifier and studying it. A bipolar sinusoidal signal is input to a diode, and the output voltage is monitored. The 1uF capacitor is used to filter the output signal and make it more or less constant, but it has not been used while obtaining the data shown in the following image

Figure : A diode used as a half-wave rectifier. The input waveform shown in green was passed through a forward biased diode, and monitored by CH2 (red trace ) .

We can observe that only the positive half of the signal passes through the diode. It can also be observed , that since this is not an ideal diode, the conducted portion has lost some amplitude. This loss is a consequence of the forward threshold voltage of the PN junction, and in case of this diode, it is around 0.6 Volts. This threshold voltage depends on the band structure of the diode , and in the next section we shall examine this voltage for various diodes.

Measurement of Current-Voltage Characteristics of diodes

In practice, diodes only start conducting in the forward direction after a certain threshold potential difference is present. This voltage, also known as the barrier potential, depends on the band gap of the diode, and we shall measure it to determine how the electrical properties affect the externally visible physical properties of the diode.

A programmable voltage output of the PSLab (PV1) will be increased in small steps starting from 0 Volts, and a voltmeter input (CH3) will be used to determine the point when the diode starts conducting. The presence of a known resistor between PV1 and CH3 acts as a current limiter, and also enables us to calculate the current flow using some elementary application of the Ohm’s law. I = (PV1-CH3)/1000 .


The following image shows I-V characteristics of various diodes ranging from Schottky to Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs).

It may be interesting to note that the frequency of the light emitted by LEDs is directly proportional to the threshold voltage. In case of the white LED, it is almost similar to the blue LED because white LEDs are composed of blue LEDs, and a phosphor coating that partially converts blue light to yellow. The combination results in white light.

Zener diodes

Zener diodes are a special variant of diodes that also conduct electricity in the the reverse direction once a certain threshold has been crossed. This threshold can be determined during the manufacturing process, and zener diodes with breakdown voltages such as 3.3V , 5.6V , 6.8V etc are commercially available.

In the following image, the I-V characteristics of a 3.3V zener diode have been measured with the PSLab . As can be observed, the diode starts to conduct small amounts of current from around 2V itself, but significant current flow is usually present once the rated voltage is achieved.

In the forward direction, the zener appears to behave as a regular diode.

Resources

Continue ReadingUnderstanding PN Junctions with the Pocket Science Lab

Linking Codecov to your Angular2 Project

As a developer, the importance of testing code is well known. Testing source code helps to prevent bugs and syntax errors by cross-checking it with an expected output.
As stated on their official website: “Code coverage provides a visual measurement of what source code is being executed by a test suite”. This information indicates to the software developer where they should write new tests in the effort to achieve higher coverage, and consequently a lower chance of being buggy. Hence nearly every public repository on git uses codecov, a tool to measure the coverage of their source code.

In this blog, we shall see how to link codecov, with a public repository on Github when the code has been written in Angular2(Typescript). We shall assume that the repository uses Travis CI for integration.

STEP 1:
Go to https://codecov.io/gh/ and login to your Github account.

It will now give you the option to chose a repository to add for coverage. Select your repository.

STEP 2:
Navigate to Settings Tab, you should see something like this:

Follow the above-mentioned instructions.

STEP 3:
We now come to one of the most important parts of Codecov integration. Writing the files in our repo to enable this.
We will need three main files:
Travis.yml- which will ensure continuous integration services on your git hosted project
Codecov.yml- to personalise your settings and override the default settings in codecov.”The Codecov Yaml file is the single point of configuration, providing the developers with a transparent and version controlled file to adjust all Codecov settings.” as mentioned in the official website
Package.json- to inform npm of the new dependencies related to codecov, in addition to providing all the metadata to the user.

In .travis.yml, Add the following line:
after_success:

 - bash <(curl -s https://codecov.io/bash)

In codecov.yml, Add the following

Source: https://github.com/codecov/support/wiki/Codecov-Yaml#
 codecov:
 url: "string" # [enterprise] your self-hosted Codecov endpoint
 # ex. https://codecov.company.com
 slug: "owner/repo" # [enterprise] the project's name when using the global upload tokens
 branch: master # the branch to show by default, inherited from your git repository settings
 # ex. master, stable or release
 # default: the default branch in git/mercurial
 bot: username # the username that will consume any oauth requests
 # must have previously logged into Codecov
 ci: # [advanced] a list of custom CI domains
 - "ci.custom.com"
 notify: # [advanced] usage only
 after_n_builds: 5 # how many build to wait for before submitting notifications
 # therefore skipping status checks
 countdown: 50 # number of seconds to wait before checking CI status
 delay: 100 # number of seconds between each CI status check

coverage:
 precision: 2 # how many decimal places to display in the UI: 0 <= value <= 4 round: down # how coverage is rounded: down/up/nearest range: 50...100 # custom range of coverage colors from red -> yellow -> green

notify:
 irc:
 default: # -> see "sections" below
 server: "chat.freenode.net" #*S the domain of the irc server
 branches: null # -> see "branch patterns" below
 threshold: null # -> see "threshold" below
 message: "template string" # [advanced] -> see "customized message" below

gitter:
 default: # -> see "sections" below
 url: "https://webhooks.gitter.im/..." #*S unique Gitter notifications url
 branches: null # -> see "branch patterns" below
 threshold: null # -> see "threshold" below
 message: "template string" # [advanced] -> see "customized message" below

status:
 project: # measuring the overall project coverage
 default: # context, you can create multiple ones with custom titles
 enabled: yes # must be yes|true to enable this status
 target: auto # specify the target coverage for each commit status
 # option: "auto" (must increase from parent commit or pull request base)
 # option: "X%" a static target percentage to hit
 branches: # -> see "branch patterns" below
 threshold: null # allowed to drop X% and still result in a "success" commit status
 if_no_uploads: error # will post commit status of "error" if no coverage reports we uploaded
 # options: success, error, failure
 if_not_found: success # if parent is not found report status as success, error, or failure
 if_ci_failed: error # if ci fails report status as success, error, or failure


patch: # pull requests only: this commit status will measure the
 # entire pull requests Coverage Diff. Checking if the lines
 # adjusted are covered at least X%.
 default:
 enabled: yes # must be yes|true to enable this status
 target: 80% # specify the target "X%" coverage to hit
 branches: null # -> see "branch patterns" below
 threshold: null # allowed to drop X% and still result in a "success" commit status
 if_no_uploads: error # will post commit status of "error" if no coverage reports we uploaded
 # options: success, error, failure
 if_not_found: success
 if_ci_failed: error

changes: # if there are any unexpected changes in coverage
 default:
 enabled: yes # must be yes|true to enable this status
 branches: null # -> see "branch patterns" below
 if_no_uploads: error
 if_not_found: success
 if_ci_failed: error

ignore: # files and folders that will be removed during processing
 - "tests/*"
 - "demo/*.rb"

fixes: # [advanced] in rare cases the report tree is invalid, specify adjustments here
 - "old_path::new_path"

# comment: false # to disable comments
 comment:
 layout: "header, diff, changes, sunburst, suggestions, tree"
 branches: null # -> see "branch patterns" below
 behavior: default # option: "default" posts once then update, posts new if delete
 # option: "once" post once then updates, if deleted do not post new
 # option: "new" delete old, post new
 # option: "spammy" post new

Your package.json should look like this:

{
 "name": "example-typescript",
 "version": "1.0.0",
 "description": "Codecov Example Typescript",
 "main": "index.js",
 "devDependencies": {
 "chai": "^3.5.0",
 "codecov": "^1.0.1",
 "mocha": "^2.5.3",
 "nyc": "^6.4.4",
 "tsd": "^0.6.5",
 "typescript": "^1.8.10"
 },
 "scripts": {
 "postinstall": "tsd install",
 "pretest": "tsc test/*.ts --module commonjs --sourcemap",
 "test": "nyc mocha",
 "posttest": "nyc report --reporter=json && codecov -f coverage/*.json"
 },
 "repository": {
 "type": "git",
 "url": "git+https://github.com/Myname/example-typescript.git"
 },
 /*Optional*/
 "author": "Myname",
 "license": "Lic.name",
 "bugs": {
 "url": "https://github.com/example-typescript-path"
 },
 "homepage": "https://github.com/Myname/example-typescript#readme"
 }

Most of the code in package.json is metadata.
Two major parts of the code above are the devDependencies and the scripts.
In devDependencies, make sure to include the latest versions of all the packages your repository is using.
In scripts:

  • Postinstall – indicates the actions to be performed, once installation is complete.
  • Pretest – is for just before running ng test.
  • Test – indicates what is used while testing.
  • Posttest – is what is run just after testing is complete.

Check this repository for the sample files to generate the reports to be uploaded for Codecov: https://github.com/codecov/example-typescript

Check https://docs.codecov.io/v4.3.6/docs/codecov-yaml for detailed step by step instructions on writing codecov.yaml and https://docs.codecov.io/v4.3.6/docs for any general information

Continue ReadingLinking Codecov to your Angular2 Project