How does one make an Amplitude vs. Frequency plot?

[Daniel Sellers]

I am working on homework for a physics lab course and I am asked to write a python function which will produce an amplitude v.s frequency plot. In a previous problem I wrote a function which simulates data from a sine wave in the form of a time series; the new function should be able to take this data as input and produce a plot.

I am somewhat at a loss as to where to begin with this problem. I have worked some with amplitude vs frequency plots in the lab, but I haven't been asked to produce one before and after a couple hours I still don't have a starting point.

To be clear, I'm not asking for programming advice, I'll figure out the code after I know what I'm doing conceptually.

I have calculated ∆v, the frequency resolution which depends on the sampling frequency and number of data points taken but I am stuck on this: given a set of data points from a sine wave, how do I extract the amplitude of each frequency component?

Sorry if the language used here is somewhat unclear, I will happily clarify anything doesn't make sense above.

 

[jedishrfu]

Usually you would use some python plotting library.

Here’s one such library:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matplotlib

 

[Daniel Sellers]

Yes, it turns out that I just needed to work the standard scipy fft function into my own function and configure it to accept a time series array as input.

Thanks for your reply, turns out I was just overcomplicating things by trying to write a function to plot amplitude vs. frequency from scratch.