Abstract
The use of smartphones in experimental physics is by now widely accepted and documented. PASCO scientific’s smart cart, in combination with student-owned smartphones and free apps, has opened up a new universe of low-cost experiments that have traditionally required cumbersome and expensive equipment. In this paper we demonstrate the simplicity, convenience, and cost-saving achieved by replacing a plethora of traditional laboratory sensors, wires, air tracks, interface boards, and other equipment clutter with the smart cart and the free SPARKvue app for the smart cart by carrying out flyby measurements of the magnetic field of a Helmholtz coil. Recently, Monteiro et al. reported a similar experiment with a single coil but with an ordinary laboratory cart, and had to use the accelerometer of a smart-phone to laboriously extract the precise position of the mag-netic field sensor of the smartphone. The use of the smart cart in this report obviates the need for using the accelerometer and the concomitant laborious extraction of the position data. The eponymous smart cart broadcasts its precise location wirelessly over Bluetooth®. In addition to the single circular coil verification of the Biot-Savart law, we also used the Helmholtz coil to generate and measure a uniform magnetic field over a wide central region.
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