Tom Stanton’s trebuchet altitude measurement “golf ball”
— May 22nd, 2019
YouTuber Tom Stanton built a trebuchet about a year ago. Now, in order to figure out just how high it can toss something, he designed a custom altitude tracking device in the form of an oversize golf ball.
An Arduino Nano is squeezed inside this sphere, along with a battery, an altimeter, an accelerometer, and even a small servo. The altimeter is used for primary height measurement, while the accelerometer detects launches. A servo then deploys a parachute four seconds later to keep the electronics safe.
As it turns out, the trebuchet is able to fling the ball in the air 60 meters. While impressive, per Stanton’s discussion, it may not be as efficient as you might suspect! Be sure to check out the project in the video below!
May 23rd, 2019 at 15:46:54
I love the project. I would be interested in logging the accellerometer and altimeter data to plot later using Octave or Processing. With 1 KB of EEPROM you could store 32 16bit samples per second for both the accellerometer and the altimeter over 8 seconds. You could just set or clear the most significant bit of the EEPROM address so you could store 512 bytes of altimeter data in the first half of the EEPROM and the accellerometer data in the second half of the EEPROM. I was also curious why you used the 4 second timer to deploy the chute as opposed to using the altimeter data.
May 26th, 2019 at 00:19:51
Super interessante! ótima engenharia!!
May 28th, 2019 at 23:37:04
so smart