Review of sound card photogates

TL;DR

This paper reviews cost-effective methods for creating accurate photogates using computer sound cards, and provides open-source software to enhance physics experiments in educational settings.

Contribution

It introduces experimentally tested low-cost sound card photogate implementations and offers a comprehensive, free open-source software tool for physics experiments.

Findings

Multiple low-cost, accurate photogate designs demonstrated

Open-source software enhances experimental efficiency

Accessible solutions for educational physics experiments

Abstract

Photogates are probably the most commonly used electronic instruments to aid experiments in the field of mechanics. Although they are offered by many manufacturers, they can be too expensive to be widely used in all classrooms, in multiple experiments or even at a home experimentation. Today all computers have a sound card - an interface for analogue signals. It is possible to make very simple yet highly accurate photogates for cents, while much more sophisticated solutions are also available at a still very low cost. In our review we show several experimentally tested ways of implementing sound card photogates in detail, and we also provide a full-featured, free, open-source photogate software as a much more efficient experimentation tool than the usually used sound recording programs. Further information is provided in a dedicated page, www.noise.physx.u-szeged.hu/edudev.