Where 252 taught students to build a circuit alone, 351 teaches them to build a system as a team. Raspberry Pi microprocessors, communication protocols (UART, SPI, I²C), sensor integration, motor control, Python-driven data acquisition, and professional documentation. Everything converges into a single working instrument that requires hardware, firmware, software, cultural research, and user-centered design to all work in concert.
How students experience PHYS 351 Every Monday, teams of three gather in Small 230 for hands-on build sessions. Each student rotates through roles — Circuit Architect, Firmware Lead, QA Specialist — so nobody hides behind a single skill. Weekly peer evaluations keep accountability high. By semester's end, each team has produced not just a working instrument, but a professional user's manual, a live demo, and a technical presentation.
Before the final project begins, students complete eight progressive labs — each building on the last — mastering the specific protocols, sensors, and actuators they will need. Every lab is hands-on, team-based, and documented through formal reports with circuit diagrams, error analysis, and conclusions.
Each fall, Dr. Yang designs a themed final project drawing from a different culture. She provides the concept, technical specifications, and philosophical framing. Teams of three spend three months designing, building, and documenting their own unique interpretation, bringing the theme to life in ways that are always different and always their own.
What turns here is not a plea; it is attention itself. Inspired by the Tibetan prayer wheel tradition, students built a secular, dual-rotor instrument that listens for a human cue — a spoken phrase, a clap cadence, a breath pattern — and transforms it into balanced, meditative motion. Features extracted from the input deterministically seed rotation direction, speed profiles, and mindfulness-aligned affirmations.
Dutch heritage touches the sun. Named for the windmills along the Zaan River, this project challenged students to engineer a modern interpretation of a traditional Dutch windmill powered entirely by solar energy. Each team built bidirectional blade rotation, variable speed control, and a translational mechanism functioning under natural light with full software control.
Memory in light. Symmetry in motion. Inspired by the Japanese aesthetic of beauty in transient patterns, KaleidoMneme challenged teams to build a Raspberry Pi–controlled kaleidoscope with at least three motor-driven rotating mirrors, multi-colored LEDs, and an integrated Pi camera capturing 20-second video clips of the exact moment of beauty they wished to keep.
Navigating the canals with code and current. Each team engineered a motorized gondola with bidirectional propulsion, steering control, and environmental sensing. The challenge was not just movement but grace: smooth acceleration curves, obstacle avoidance, and a user interface that felt as fluid as the waterways that inspired it.
Where circuitry meets the county fair. The inaugural themed project: a motorized miniature carousel inspired by the American festival tradition. Controlled by Raspberry Pi with variable speed, directional control, and sensor-driven interaction. Teams designed their own structural forms and lighting sequences to capture the kinetic joy of the boardwalk.
道生一，一生二，二生三，三生萬物。Tao Te Ching · Chapter XLII“The way begets one. One begets two.
Two begets three. Three begets ten thousand things.”