Transients in electric circuits with Raspberry Pi and Python

Raspberry Pi (Rpi) can be used as a powerful lab tool for educational experiments on transient phenomena in electric circuits: we propose an approach in which almost all the needed hardware, even the power supply, for running the experiments and for data acquisition is included in the compact RPi device. Furthermore, all the codes to carry out the experiments and to analyze the data, can be realized step by step during the practical sessions using simple Python scripts and open source libraries. Successful tests can be carried out on RC and RL circuits with inexpensive components. The data acquisition rate is suitable to observe also eye-catching profiles such as the damped oscillations in RLC circuits, and high quality plots of the results can be produced with the Matplotlib module of the Python language. On the other hand, Python can be used to choose optimized values of the parameters R, L, or C, with respect to the features of the experimental setup