ArduinoMania

One of the people that I asked to look over the course notes and give me suggestions suggested another lab that would likely appeal to bioengineers:

another cheap experiment, accelerometers from Sparkfun to measure gait patterns or detect falls.  If really ambitious, you can teach chaos theory here with analyzing chaos levels in gait patterns—they are different for men and women.

I’ve used accelerometers before, both the analog output ADXL335 and the I²C MQA8452Q. The ADXL335 breakout board was from Adafruit Industries, the MQA8452Q from Sparkfun.  Although I personally prefer the I²C interface, since it takes up only 2 Arduino pins, programming is outside the scope of this class.

This lab sounds like fun, and it would be good for the bioengineers to think of accelerometers as cheap sensors that are easily used, rather than as magic that comes in cell phones, I’m not sure how we would get a circuits lab out of this. Even the analog-output accelerometer just needs to have its XYZ pins connected to analog inputs on the Arduino.  Anything interesting you do with the accelerometer is in either the mechanical mounting or in the software analyzing the data, not in electronic circuits.

We have several constraints in selecting labs for this circuits course:

• Lab must teach something useful to the students.
• Lab must seem interesting (or at least useful) to bioengineering students.
• Lab must not be dangerous (either to students or to equipment).
• Lab must be doable in one 3-hour lab session (we can afford at most 2 labs that are 2-session labs).
• Lab cannot require students to be able to program computers.
• Lab cannot require knowledge of electronics beyond what is taught in the course.
• Lab should support the teaching of traditional linear circuits.
• Lab should involve student design and not just analysis of existing designs.

The accelerometer lab fails on two points: any design component would have to be software and there is no support for teaching linear circuits in the lab.  That’s too bad, because it is otherwise a cool lab idea.