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Posted by Thomas A. Frank at 2/13/2001 3:24 PM EST


Engineer on team #121, The Islanders/Rhode Warrior, from Middletown (RI) High School and Naval Undersea Warfare Center.


In Reply to: Pot Gyro
Posted by Jason294 on 2/13/2001 11:36 AM EST:



: Just wondering if anyone had fooled around with this idea. I attached about a 4 inch long piece of aluminum bar with a small weight on the end to a pot and used the feed back as a good gyro




Actually, it's called a pendulum, not a gyro. That is in fact important, because you will need to look at the speed of response of your sensor (see below).

I am looking at it, but I'm not sure it is worth the trouble/risk, as the drivers are doing fine without any artificial aids, and the risks associated with complex software are perhaps not worth the benefit.

Please prove me wrong :-)

Please remember that there is a time constant associated with a pendulum:

time/swing T = pi * sqrt of (length/g), units having to be consistant (ie: meters and 9.8 m/sec^2). A 1 meter pendulum rod is the classic one second beat clock. So if you make the rod 0.1 meters long, you have a 0.317 second pendulum, which results in some interesting results if you look at the possibility of oscillation.

Also keep in mind that the above equation assumes a massless rod - the Cg of the system is in the bob. If not, then the whole thing appears "shorter", with a resulting higher frequency.

Hope that was helpful.

Tom Frank