Resumen de Implementing Raspberry Pi 3 and Python in the Physics Laboratory
Alexuan Martínez, Christian Nieves, Armando Rúa
Many physics projects recently designed for high school teachers use Arduino as the main tool for managing sensors and data acquisition. This is a low-cost integrated development environment programmed with a simplified version of the C++ language. In comparison, the Raspberry Pi 3 platform, which also allows for the design of physics projects, can expose students to the use of the most trending language in the field: Python. With this in mind, we have developed a project to measure the acceleration of objects due to gravity near the Earth’s surface using a Raspberry Pi 3 computer and Python as the programming language. It utilizes an infrared sensor connected to the Raspberry Pi 3, a monitor with an HDMI connection, a mouse, and a keyboard. The experiment yields results with a percentage difference of 2.8% on average for an estimated value of the gravitational acceleration of 9.8 m/s2.
