Did you know that Galileo had a tray to measure the speed of light?

The concept of the experiment was correct but the apparatus (his eyes) was far too slow.

The value of the speed of light is well known today and is used as a physical constant in many applications. In this experiment we've used the speed of light and a little bit of programming to measure the cable length.

It is remarkable how fast electronics is today. Our setup enables us to measure the distance, at 8 cm of resolution, taken by an electromagnetic wave(light) travelling at ~300 000 km/s. Now, let's take a minute here and try to calculate how much time an object travelling at 300 000 km/s needs to take an 8 cm long path - it needs very very very very little time and yet we are able to measure it! In the video below an implementation of the Time Domain Reflectometry and the cable length measurement experiment is shown in the Jupyter Notebook. Jupyter Notebook is a web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and explanatory text. We've developed support for the Jupyter application with Red Pitaya libraries enabling control of all features of the STEMlab boards such as: signal acquisition, signal generation, digital signal control, communication etc.

Find more here http://bit.ly/RedPitayaUpdate1
And watch the full video below