Welcome to this overview of SPARKvue software from PASCO scientific.
In this series of movies, I'll be demonstrating some of the key features
of SPARKvue version 2, our latest release.
SPARKvue 2 is a free update from SPARKvue 1.
I'll launch SPARKvue 2 on my Windows computer.
SPARKvue 2 is also available on Macintosh computers,
iPads and Android tablets,
and will soon be supported on Chromebooks and browsers.
SPARKvue 2 opens and detects that my computer has an on-board microphone
that could serve as the source of sound level and sound intensity data.
In addition to measurements built into our computing devices,
PASCO makes a series of more than 70 PASPORT sensors
such as this Advanced Chemistry Sensor that I'll be using in this investigation.
To connect a PASPORT sensor to SPARKvue we need to use an interface.
I have two interfaces here, a USB Link and a SPARKlink Air.
The USB Link connects directly to a computer's USB port.
The SPARKlink Air can do the same, and in addition can connect wirelessly via Bluetooth.
My USB Link is already connected. I'm going to use it.
If you're using a wireless interface, first pair it to your computer's operating system.
I'm going to use the Advanced Chemistry Sensor to do a quick investigation of a reaction.
I'll begin by connecting the Advanced Chemistry Sensor to my interface.
As soon as I've made that connection, SPARKvue shows
that I've connected the sensor on this, the Home screen,
and shows all the measurements available from the sensor.
The Advanced Chemistry Sensor supports, among other measurements,
temperature, pressure, pH, and conductivity.
Readings from those sensors are shown live.
Connected to my Advanced Chemistry Sensor are the temperature, pH, and conductivity probes,
and I've placed them in a beaker of vinegar.
In a moment, I'd like to see how those measurements change
when I add an antacid tablet to the vinegar.
While I can see the live measurements here on the Home screen,
I'd prefer to record data and visualize and analyze it in a variety of displays.
We have three paths available to us at the bottom
of the SPARKvue Home screen: Open, Show, and Build.
I'd like to begin by showing just the temperature measurement.
I'll touch on Temperature to select it, and choose Show.
The Show path automatically builds for me a four-page SPARKlab.
Each page of the SPARKlab has a different display of the measurement
I selected, beginning with a graph of temperature versus time.
To begin recording data, I'll go to the green Start button
in the lower left corner of my screen,
and as soon as I press Start, the experiment clock begins counting up
and data points begin to record in my graph.
The blue dots are the data points connected by lines for convenience,
and the legend in the upper right shows that
Run #1 is associated with this unique symbol and color,
in case I want to collect additional runs in the future.
I'm going to add the effervescent antacid tablet to my vinegar,
and I can see and hear that it begins to bubble.
I'm currently looking at a very wide range of temperatures on my y-axis.
I'm going to open up the tools by pressing the Tools button
in the lower left of my graph, and I'm going to choose this Scale to Fit tool.
When I press Scale to Fit, the graph axes automatically scale
so that the graph is filled with data.
Here, I can better see this decrease in temperature that has begun
as soon as I added the antacid tablet.
While that reaction continues, let's take a look at the other displays
that were created for me in the Show path.
I can see in the lower right that I'm currently on Graph 1,
that is page 1: Graph 1,
and if I click the right-facing arrow, I'll proceed to page two of my SPARKlab,
which shows the current temperature reading in a digits display.
This is great for seeing the current reading and looking for changes,
and I can see that the temperature is indeed continuing to decrease.
If I were on a touch screen, I could actually swipe to page 3,
but I'm not, so I'm going to click the right-facing arrow to get to page 3,
which features a table of time and temperature.
I can see from these time measurements that I'm recording data once every half second.
That rate of recording, or that sample rate, is dictated
by the 2 Hz Periodic sample rate, as indicated here at the bottom,
and in a later movie we'll look at how we can change that.
But SPARKvue has chosen a reasonable beginning sample rate for me
for the Advanced Chemistry Sensor.
I'll move on to the final page in my SPARKlab, which is the meter display.
The meter is great for seeing changes and magnitude of changes for measurements,
but I can see here that my temperature has pretty much stabilized,
and may be increasing a little bit.
In order to see those changes over the course of the entire experiment,
I'm going to proceed back to page 1.
I could go left, but I can navigate nonlinearly by clicking on the name of the page I'm currently on
and in the pop-up, selecting the page I'd like to go to.
I can indeed see that the temperature is increasing.
I'm going to go down the lower left and hit the Stop button to end my recording
of Run #1 -- that is all the data points between pressing Start and Stop.
Well, I can see that the temperature was pretty stable and then decreased,
and in the end, increased a little bit,
but I'd like to improve my view of this data a little bit,
and I can do it by directly manipulating the graph.
If I touch and drag in the middle of the graph, I can move it around
as if it were a sheet of graph paper on the tabletop.
I can also touch and drag on any of the numerical labels
on either the x-axis or the y-axis to stretch or shrink them.
So through a combination of stretching and shrinking and moving,
I can get a better view of my data.
We've seen already, though, that there's a tool that can automatically rescale
the axes for me, so I'm going to use that tool again.
I'll go down and open the tool palette and this Scale to Fit button
shows a graph icon with four outward expanding arrows,
and as before, when I press Scale to Fit, the axes are automatically scaled for me
to fill the graph with my data.
I'd like to do some analysis of this data now.
I might ask a question like, "What was the overall temperature change
from the very beginning to the end."
To figure that out, I'm going to go to my tool palette
and select the Coordinates tool.
When I select Coordinates, SPARKvue analyzes the entire run
and gives me some information about it.
The first row in the report tells me the x1 and y1 coordinates,
and those are the x and y coordinates of the first data point in that run,
which I can see were zero, that is time zero seconds,
and temperature 23.9 °C.
The second row similarly shows me the x2 and y2 coordinates,
that is the coordinates of the rightmost point in my run,
and the third row in the Coordinates tool shows me dx and dy,
or the change in x and the change in y.
I can see that over 156 seconds my temperature changed -1.2 °C,
so the temperature decreased over the course of this reaction.
This is the analysis for the entire run.
I may instead be interested in analyzing only a portion of the run,
perhaps just the region between when I added the tablet
and when the bubbling stopped right about here.
I'm going to turn off the Coordinates tool that's currently analyzing
the entire run, and show you how to select just a region for analysis.
The leftmost tool in the palette is the Select tool.
It looks like an arrow.
When I turn on Select, I can come to my graph and click and drag a box around the data points
that I'd like to analyze.
Points inside the box are highlighted in yellow.
Once I've made my selection, I can choose Done
to confirm that selection.
If I choose a tool like Coordinates,
it's going to analyze only those highlighted data points.
I could use Coordinates. I'm going to show you another tool, though.
I'll come over here to the letter Sigma, which is Statistics,
and I can choose among these statistics.
I'll choose Minimum, Maximum, and Mean in this case.
When I press OK, I see an annotation of the minimum, maximum,
and mean values over just the selected data points.
We can use the selection arrow to draw a box around the data points
that we'd like to analyze if we want to look at just a region of our run.
I'm going to turn off both statistics and my selection,
and make one final selection, this time of a single data point.
I'd like to select and annotate this data point
to indicate when I added the antacid tablet.
I'll once again choose the selection arrow, and click somewhere near the data point that
I'd like to annotate.
I can use the left and right arrows here to fine tune my selection,
and once I'm happy with it I'll choose Done.
The selected point is highlighted here in yellow,
and now I can do analysis or annotation of that single data point.
I'm going to come down to the tool palette and choose the letter T for Annotate.
Now I can enter a note that indicates that this is when I added the antacid.
When I press OK, I have that note attached to the data point that I had selected.
When I chose the Show path, I had a choice of only one measurement
to look at, but the Advanced Chemistry Sensor,
and a number of PASCO's other MultiMeasure sensors,
allow for more than one measurement at a time.
It turns out that even though I wasn't looking at the other measurements
from the sensor, they were recorded when I pressed record.
So I do have recorded data for pH and conductivity, and I'd like to quickly show you
that I can switch this graph of temperature vs time
to show a graph of another measurement, such as pH vs time.
I'm going to go to the y-axis measurement, temperature, and click on it.
This brings up the properties for my line graph,
allowing me to change what's on the x- or y-axes.
I'll change the y-axis from temperature to pH and press OK.
I'll Scale to Fit again, and I can see that over the course of this reaction the pH increased.
I could similarly change this graph over to conductivity,
but there are other features that we won't explore right now
allowing me to add additional axes.
For example, I could look at pH, temperature, and conductivity
all on the same graph at the same time.
I'm done, though, with this introductory lesson.
I'd like to return to the Home screen so I can do another investigation,
and I can return Home by pressing the Home button in the upper left.
Now, I've collected some data into my file, so SPARKvue warns me
that there are unsaved changes to my file.
I'm not going to save it in this case.
We'll explore that in a future lesson, so I'll choose No.
That returns me back to the Home screen, ready for the next investigation.