Homemade Damped Oscillations
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I learned an easy way to make ringdowns (damped oscillations). By inductively coupling
the output of a square wave generator to a tuned circuit, the very high Q oscillations
may be viewed. This was all done cheaply and quickly. This is a very demonstrative
circuit for understanding oscillations.
Damped oscillations are the natural response of a tuned circuit. The differential
equation describing it is fairly easy to solve.
Here's my setup:
To get square waves, I wired a 555 timer to be in astable mode. I used a similar circuit
to build my digital clock. The square waves have this appearance:
Here's some nice pictures of ringdowns:
Adding more inductor, a lower frequency is viewed. Note that the decay is more rapid too,
since the inductor has an internal resistance.
That's it!
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