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13 votes

Calculating pitch, yaw, and roll from mag, acc, and gyro data

So my longer answer below assumes that the board will undergo acceleration and during this time you still need to be able to measure your pitch, roll and yaw within a short amount of time. If the ...
Dave851's user avatar
  • 131
7 votes

Seeing through walls and noninvasive structural integrity metrics

Depending on the region and structure of building the techniques might vary. Below are few suggestions Termite inspection is another popular method to determine the structure integrity of building. ...
Mahendra Gunawardena's user avatar
7 votes
Accepted

Alternatives to laser line?

A few points that don't fit into a comment but could help you: Get a better laser source than a 4 \$ laser diode. "Better" means a laser with higher beam quality. When you look at a laser's ...
OpticalResonator's user avatar
6 votes

Would it be hard to create a camera that could see the whole electro-magnetic spectrum?

Look at it this way: A simple compass will detect from zero to about 0.1 Hz your AM radio detects around a MHz your cellphone around a few GHz or so Radar systems anywhere from 100kHz to 1 THz ...
Carl Witthoft's user avatar
5 votes

Distance sensors with accuracy of 1 mm?

Was looking for other distance solutions, and came across this question. A sensor that I've found works well is the Sharp GP2Y0E02B (digital version) (newer version is the GP2Y0E03). Configuring it ...
asylumax's user avatar
  • 181
4 votes
Accepted

Uncertainty Calculation of LVDT displacement transducers for length measurement

For the Maths of calculating uncertainty the standard document is the GUM. Which describes all the maths but can be somewhat unclear if you don't already have some idea how it is supposed to work. ...
nivag's user avatar
  • 1,035
4 votes

How do robots maintain stability?

PID, LQR, and LQG feedback control laws are only small pieces of the solution. Alone, these methods generally cannot solve the problem of balanced bipedal walking. The reason why is because these ...
Paul's user avatar
  • 2,539
4 votes

Calculating pitch, yaw, and roll from mag, acc, and gyro data

From the accelerator sensor data, you can only calculate pitch and roll. The bellow document from Freescale explains with plenty of information what you need: AN3461 - Tilt Sensing Using a Three-Axis ...
Efthymios Kalyviotis's user avatar
4 votes

What does "redundancy" mean?

Wikipedia says In engineering, redundancy is the duplication of critical components or functions of a system with the intention of increasing reliability of the system, usually in the form of a ...
idkfa's user avatar
  • 1,734
4 votes

Difference between PI and PD controller?

PI - Proportional - Integral The output is a combination of how far you are from the goal and the integral of your distance from the goal (total error over time). This means that it will track small ...
Andrew's user avatar
  • 766
4 votes
Accepted

How can I detect black spots?

The simplest method will be a multi-step approach. The first step will be a defective product detection, that gathers general data about the product stream and quarantines defective products. On a ...
Mark's user avatar
  • 5,343
4 votes
Accepted

What is the difference between washer and O-ring, what are their advantages of one over the other?

An o-ring usually (but not always) has a round section and is made of a compressible material such as rubber, neoprene, silicon etc. A washer tends to have a square or rectangular section and is ...
Solar Mike's user avatar
  • 15.5k
4 votes

Can a sensor tell the difference between gravity vs. acceleration?

Imagine an accelerometer that is in a box, and held aloft by a rope which is attached to a pulley, balanced by another box of equal mass. You could either: 1) Cut the rope. The box will fall ...
Jonathan R Swift's user avatar
4 votes

Calibrate a sensor using another, already calibrated sensor

The starting point is to recognize that your calibrated sensor is first used to calibrate your light source, and then your calibrated light source is used to measure the response of your second ...
Jeffrey J Weimer's user avatar
3 votes
Accepted

What sensors should be used to analyze vibration of a hard disk?

There are two types of sensors commonly used in hard disks to detect vibration and head crashing. They are: Accelerometer: Accelerometers are used to detect sudden vibrations. Sudden Motion Sensors: ...
Mahendra Gunawardena's user avatar
3 votes

Can sensors detect objects 200 metres away?

Yes, these kind of sensors exists, they're called radars. Military grade naval radars can detect a coin from tens of kilometers away, so that kind of performance (~1m² objects detected from ~100 ...
MaximGi's user avatar
  • 318
3 votes

What type of test signal is appropriate for frequency response analysis of string instruments?

First, can you really actuate white noise? If yes, White noise would probably show many natural frequencies and harmonics. However, make sure the actuation bandwidth is sufficient for your frequency ...
Gürkan Çetin's user avatar
3 votes

Determining frequency of an ultrasonic transducer

If you're talking about a "bare" transducer (i.e., not a module with its own driver), you can just hook it up to an oscilloscope, hit it with a narrow pulse of voltage, and look for the decaying ...
Dave Tweed's user avatar
  • 6,874
3 votes

How to obtain sensor failure probabilities?

Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) is a big deal in the Nuclear industry, basically it is a mathematical approach to quantify how safe/unsafe a power plant is. Without going too deep into PRA it is a ...
willpower2727's user avatar
3 votes

Measuring the road surface quality

While the acoustic analysis idea may* work, I think the accellerometer data would be much easier to analyze. If you are looking for something that can give you better rates of data, try looking into ...
ambitiose_sed_ineptum's user avatar
3 votes
Accepted

Send sensor signals to WiFi network

I would keep the sensors passive as transponders to a house wide rfid radar scanner. Changes in the sensor would change the code on the rfid of the sensor, thus reflecting back a different ...
0tyranny0poverty's user avatar
3 votes
Accepted

Accurately measure the distance from chest to back

The simplest answer would be "a large pair of calipers". In fact, they make such a tool for exactly this task. See http://www.seritex.com/gpm-large-spreading-caliper-rounded-ends-108/ The GPM Large ...
alephzero's user avatar
  • 12.5k
3 votes

What is best sensor & method to measure human height?

Hair is mostly transparent to ultrasonic, so this is still the reliable&convenient approach - any EM spectrum readouts (3D, video, laser) will be completely falsified by hair. You just need a ...
SF.'s user avatar
  • 6,125
3 votes

What is the name and purpose of this Instrumentation / Mechanical fitting

I'd call the blue part the transmitter housing. This usually contains electronics for sensor signal conversion, which converts the sensor (or probe) low level ...
JockeR's user avatar
  • 61
3 votes
Accepted

Kalman filter for sensor fusion — what is the advantage?

You can't just "average the two sensors" The acceleration readings are essentially meaningless unless you know their direction, you can't know their direction unless you have the platform ...
TimWescott's user avatar
  • 2,472
3 votes
Accepted

Is there an industry consensus standard for storing sensor data?

My experience is there is no particular standards for saving sensor data. Usually one just picks a format that is useful to the task at hand. If, for instance one wants to do post processing analysis ...
Eric S's user avatar
  • 880
3 votes

Calibrate a sensor using another, already calibrated sensor

Plot dat_A against dat_B. Fit a curve to it (linear would be the simplest). Use the curve as a lookup table to lookup sensor A ...
AJN's user avatar
  • 951
3 votes

Calibrate a sensor using another, already calibrated sensor

Apart from Jeffrey's excellent analysis I'd like to point out that, assuming that sensor A is calibrated and has a linear response, it seems like sensor has a non linear response. Figure 1: Excel ...
NMech's user avatar
  • 24.3k
2 votes

Is the reliability of automotive sensor technology impeding the success of self driving car?

Current sensor and computing technology permits a vehicle to be operated statistically safer by a computer than by a human. "Statistically" is the key word here. Every day there are situations where ...
ericnutsch's user avatar
  • 7,904
2 votes

What is Radial and Thickness Mode Vibration in a Piezo Electric Ceramic Disc Transducer?

Texas Instruments has extensive material on this Piezo Electric disc for applications of measurements fluid level. You can search their website for STEMINC and you will see two discs used on Thickness ...
Matthew's user avatar
  • 21

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