PHY405 Electronics Lab - Notebook Guidelines

Each PHY405 student must document your work and learning in this course.

Although you are only required to turn in lab reports, not your lab notebook, the Instructor or TA may ask to see your notebook to help you with a problem you are having or to clarify something in your report.

A lack of a good notebook and documentation can also sometimes lead to very unpleasant Academic Integrity investigations, so be careful to document your work carefully.

A bound paper notebook is the easiest way to keep an indelible yet easily accessible record.

Common electronic file formats (e.g. Word, LaTeX, txt, …) can more easily be untraceably edited after the fact.
Secure electronic notebooks with an indelible revision history tend to be expensive, proprietary, and designed for medical and life sciences.

We recommend using a hybrid method where i.e. a paper notebook for quick sketches, notes, and calculations, but recording your data in Excel with lots of notes and dates embedded the Excel file.

The instructions below assume a paper notebook, but you should read them even if using hybrid methods since the goal is to have the same effective functionality.

Basic formatting

Every page (both left and right) should be numbered, starting with 1 for the first page.
- Page numbers are essential for cross-referencing, e.g. “This plot is generated using the data recorded on page 7, analyzed using the python program fit_bandwidth.py.”
Be sure to note the date and time frequently
- Dates are a great help finding things. You are unlikely to remember the page number for something, but you may remember roughly when you did it.
- Knowing how long a tasks takes is a great help in planning future work, and sometimes knowing when a problem happened is key debugging information.

What to record

You want to record what you are doing at the time you are doing it, with enough detail that

you can write a good report later
someone else could reproduce your work by reading your notes

Any mishaps should be noted, e.g. if you accidentally fry a component with too much current.

The only way to never fry a component is to never build a circuit, so you do not lose marks for such mishaps.
Noting the circumstances when you fry a component may help you avoiding frying other components in future.

Recording and plotting data

It is often useful to roughly plot data in your note-book/computer as you are making measurements. This helps you to understand what you are doing better, and enables you to make better choices and be more efficient by recording the data that you do need while not taking excessive unneeded data. You can produce higher quality plots later if needed.

Circuit diagrams

Include a clear diagram any circuits in your notebook or computer, with enough information so someone else could reproduce your circuit and measurements.

Use the correct symbol for each clearly labelled component.

Recording information on your computer

The main risk of documenting work on your computer is the temptation to change and edit things after the fact.

YOU MUST RESIST THIS TEMPTATION.
- We want to be able to reconstruct the messy reality, not be misled by a beautiful fiction.

Data

When recording data directly into your computer, the name of the file must be recorded in your notebook, and the file must have some reference back to the notebook.

An easy way to do this is to include the date in the file title, e.g. “Lab2_2020-01-13.xlsx” or “LCR_Resonance_2020-01-17.csv”.

It is usually best to include settings, short comments, links, etc. right in the data file.

Other Information

Unless you are skilled and have the right software and hardware, quick sketches, diagrams, and calculations are usually easier and faster done in a paper notebook.

A quick messy sketch that exists on paper is much better than a beautiful computer drawing that does not (because you didn’t have time).
We won’t be sympathetic if you fail to finish all the lab exercises because you spend too much time making beautiful SVG sketches or LaTeX equations on your computer.
- “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”