Data Data Data

As it turns out the reason the plots of roll and pitch (refer to last post) looked so strange is because the script I wrote to extract them from the log file couldn't handle variable length strings and as such had a preference for positive numbers. Here is what it should look like:

I have also been doing some vibration testing of the IMU. One of my main concerns is that the vibrations from the solenoids/engine thrust will mess with the IMU's measurements. My first thought for generating vibration was to use a vibration motor but I didn't have one handy and I couldn't find any information on the frequency of my mobile phone vibrator so I used a large speaker (subwoofer).

Here is a plot of roll and pitch with the IMU on the speaker housing with a sine wave sweep from 20-300Hz. When stationary roll and pitch have an error of about +-0.3 degrees.

Sin sweep from 10-100Hz (horizontal scale is wrong):

I noticed that some frequencies sounded much louder than others. At first I thought this was because the ear filters out some frequencies but feeling the enclosure some frequencies definitely felt like they had a higher amplitude.

I used a iPhone app called "Vibration" to measure the amplitude of the speakers vibration (20-300Hz) which can be seen bellow (vertical axis is G's). The other option was to get the IMU to output raw acceleration data.

As can be seen the amplitude is highest at about 100Hz and 250Hz. I these are natural frequency of the speaker/housing? I am also not sure what filtering the speakers do so its possible that they filter out certain frequencies.


Because the amplitude of the vibrations vary so much I don't think any firm conclusions can be drawn but it is clear that there are some frequencies that affect the IMU more than others. Keeping in mind that the IMU was experiencing some fairly severe vibrations in excess of 2G's at peak (it was a really big subwoofer) I am happy with how it performed.

An improvement for future work would be to compensate for amplitude by scaling the raw accelerometer and data (dont think you need to change gyro data) however I am not entirely sure how you would do this in a way that didn't mess up the DCM algorithm that calculates orientation. An alternative would be to use a more consistant vibration source.

Also the test I had planed on doing tomorrow has been canceled because Buren and Sam couldn't make it. Its probably just as well because I still haven't implemented the basic roll control I wanted to test and there will be lots of bugs to fix. I have made a basic test platform which consists of 3 LED's to simulate the engine so we can see if all the axis/directions are right.