A little project to measure and visualize the forces experienced on the nation's roller coasters. Hoping to add actual evidence to the eternal discussions of "which is better, the front or back?"




Friday, June 30, 2006

Additional notes on constraints


  1. I love learning new technologies, especially in the context of a personal project, because under no other circumstance does a technology present itself so openly. At least, that's been my experience. For instance, I'm going to try and do a lot of the coding here in Python because:
    1. NodeBox, which I already mentioned
    2. I've been wanting an excuse to learn it
    3. this project feels like the right mix of light coding and quick development that I've heard lends itself to Python. It's also not doing anything super-fancy from a software perspective, so I won't be hitting my head on the language quirks right away.

  2. I like to use open source software whenever I can. In addition to the financial benefits (yay free stuff), I like the philosophy of community driven software, especially for oddball projects like this one. :-)

posted by sjml at 6/30/2006 10:14:00 PM

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I use accelerometers all the time at the Center for Applied Biomechanics (where you used to work) and I know that filtering of the accelerometer signal is really important, especially in dynamic situations. (We filter at ~200Hz for crash tests). That filtering might be difficult to implement in a standard scripting language, without using Matlab or a mathematical processing package. Also, you would need a DAS with a very high sampling frequency (~10 kHz), which could be difficult to find in non-DAS computer systems.

July 14, 2006 4:44 PM

 
Blogger sjml said...

Hi Matt! Thanks for the post! Can I ask how you found me and/or how you know I used to work at CAB?

Yeah, I'm concerned about the filtering -- I'm thinking that'll happen offline, after the data is captured, using whatever tools I need. Or are you saying the filtering needs to happen at capture? Can I just record the raw data and perform the transformations afterwards?

Obviously you guys have a higher standard of accuracy than I do... it looks like I can get about 150-175Hz with my lil' consumer accelerometer. Think that'll be enough?

Thanks for the advice!

July 14, 2006 9:13 PM

 

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