Black Box Report

For my final project in Linear Circuit Theory, our task was to analyze and solve a randomly selected black box. In case you're not familiar with the term, a black box is a small enclosure with three pins protruding from it, each with a different color: black, red, and yellow. Inside the box, there's a circuit, but the values of each component are unknown to us. The goal of the project was to use various techniques, along with our knowledge of circuits and equipment, to determine the values of these components without actually seeing the circuit itself.

As a hint, we were provided with some information about what might be inside the black box:

The unlabeled parallel lines are capacitors 1 and 2 (left to right). Pin 1 is red, pin 2 is black, and pin 3 is yellow (Ground).

The technique we used involved adding a 1000-ohm resistor to pins 1 and 2 separately and measuring the phase change with respect to increasing frequency. My groupmate and I applied voltage to these setups using a signal generator and measured the phase with an oscilloscope. Additionally, we used a multimeter to test for resistances throughout the experiment and utilized MATLAB to input our measured data and calculate the component values. For more details on this project, please see the full report below.