ArduinoMania

The Physics Lab 2 post and Physics class progress described some experiments we were going to do this week with the ultrasonic range finder(s).

What we actually did, after spending a fair amount of time discussing the schedule for the year and expectations (one of the students has not started yet, because of the amount of time he was putting into his Stanford essays—I hope he gets in after all the effort he has expended, was to drop balls and try measuring the drop with both the Maxbotix sensor and a video camera.

We tried both a ping-pong ball and a slightly larger plastic ball.  With both of them the Maxbotix sensor only detected them intermittently, and we go no useful data from the rangefinder.

The HD video from the camera was more usable, but I was not aware that Tracker could use MTS (AVCHD format) files, since it greyed them out. I wasted a lot of time converting the movies to .mov format using iMovie, a piece of software that I have come to hate for its slowness, inefficient use of disk, rigid insistence on a specific directory structure, and generally unfriendly and unintuitive user interface. I’ve gone so far as to buy Premiere Elements, with the hope that it is not so awful (but I’ve not tried to use it yet, so it might be just as bad).

It turned out that my son had not installed the Tracker software on the desktop machine, so we had to get out my laptop and try analyzing the frames there.  I remembered how to calibrate and get the autotracking set up, but I forgot how to specify the beginning and ending frame (I eventually figured it out, but only after some false starts).  The data was pretty clean, though autotracking did lose the ball at one point because of some really stupid projections about where it ought to be.  Redoing the autotracking fixed that problem.  The errors in the tracking due to motion blur were not noticeable in the position plot, made small wiggles in the velocity plot, and made huge wiggles in the acceleration plot.  We did get a chance to talk about how a ±1mm error in position results in a ±3 cm/sec error in velocity and a ±90 cm/sec² error in acceleration, when using 30 frames per second.

I tried redoing the autotracking using the AVCHD format directly from the camera, but it turns out that AVCHD uses interlaced images, so one gets two pictures of the ball in each frame. When the ball is motionless, this makes a nice circle, but when the ball is moving fast, you get two striped circles that may overlap. Tracker has trouble handling the interlacing, though a really clever algorithm could take advantage of it to get effectively double the frame rate when tracking large objects moving with reasonably constant acceleration.

Bottom line was that neither the ultrasonic rangefinder nor Tracker resulted in fast, painless measurement. We’ll have to try again next week, perhaps with bigger targets for the rangefinder. I initially thought that brighter light for the video would reduce motion blur by reducing shutter time, but it seems that the motion blur is due to interlacing, not to a slow shutter, so changing the lighting won’t help. Algorithmic changes to Tracker would be needed.

What to do in next week’s lab

1. Analyze the balldrop clips (in .mov format). For calibration, the distance we measured between the top and bottom stile of the file cabinet was 112cm. Since the ball was a few cm in front of the file cabinet, there may be some perspective error in using that measurement to calibrate the drop. Get Tracker to give you position, velocity, and acceleration plots. Use the fluctuation in the acceleration estimates to estimate the errors in the velocity and position measurements.
2. Write a Vpython program that simulates the motion of the falling ball including the initial pause before dropping, but not including the bounces.

Other homework

• Read Chapter 3.
• Work problems 3.P.36, 3.P.40, 3.P.43, 3.P.46, 3.P.52, 3.P.65, 3.P.72.
• Do computational problem 3.P.76. Note that the computational problems for Chapter 3 are not independent of each other, and you should read all the preceding problems to get hints for this problem.