Snow Day

I enlisted the help of my daughters classmates to test vertigo on a sledging run.

Its a bumpy ride as shown by the Z acceleration peaking at 5g.

The google map is too green.

First Project Proposal

The handwriting is not the best, but here is my first Vertigo project proposal from Danny, Kal and Seb.  It involves Danny doing a bit of parkour.  Now how to write a risk assessment for a front flip on grass which he can (hopefully) do.

Then This Happened

So I found out that the connections to the battery are easily detached. Soldering them back requires a very fine tipped iron and, for me a big magnifying glass. There was a surprising miniature circuit on the end of the battery.  Technology has moved on.

I am taking no chances on it happening again with the wires taped down and the battery attached to the vertigo. Back up and running again.

Cartwheel

My volunteer managed a cartwheel while wearing the vertigo on her right leg.

Due to the way I attached the vertigo x is now in the z direction so much of the data looks strange at first glance.

My interpretation of the Raw gyro is that the rotational velocity in the x (up) and y(forward) directions was around 200 deg/s.  The rotation increases in the second half of the cartwheel as her legs come down. Rotation is a minimum at the top.  The z data shows a slight side to side wobble.  Interestingly my gymnast has a problem with this simple manoeuvre on beam, landing off centre and often missing the beam.  Working to reduce the wobble in the z direction could improve this.

Making Vertigo wearable

Today's project involves getting a willing volunteer to wear the Vertigo while doing gymnastics.  I am still waiting for my gymnast to surface (typical teenager).  A quick rummage through the gifts I was once upon a time given for Christmas but never used and I found the jogging armband for my old ipod nano.  The vertigo is a good snug fit and the battery tucks under out of the way.  There is easy access to the on/off and record switches.  The only issue is x is now z, y is x and z is y.  This will have to be taken account of later.
Wakey Wakey we have a science experiment to do.

Mini Roundabout

I'm trying to do some real physics with the data I collected yesterday.  Homing in on one section of the drive, I plotted the velocity and acceleration vector diagrams.

 The accelerations are particularly interesting showing a combination of breaking/ accelerating along with centripetal accelerations.

Test Drive

It's half term so I decided to take VERTIGO for a test drive. I found that the GPS did not work if there was anything in the way of the vertigo so I added a GPS antenna.  The results were very good. Using MATLAB to analyse the data I got some good data.

Using the online tool some additional data could be added including a map feature which I think the pupils will like a lot.

The height graph from the online tool was nice but could do with labels on the axis.