egg drop device

Other Hardware Sensors
1

Hello everyone,
So I'm very new to the arduino game. I've only been playing with it off and on for a couple of weeks. My main purpose for using it is for fun and hopefully to see if I can bring it into the classroom.
So I'm trying to design an egg drop type device so not to use real eggs. (this is the common experiment to design a device that will keep the egg from breaking when dropped from a height)

I haven't been able to find any design instructions anywhere or code and was looking for help.

So I bought a pro mini and a MPU-6050 with breakout board from ebay and a rf transmitter and receiver kit. Ordered a 5v pro mini and now figured I probably should of got the 3.3v one as the 6050 uses that...

So anyways I have recieved some of the devices I need so far and want to start testing a bit.

Does anyone know where I can find some code to calculate the gforce shock force calculated from a drop?

And also for hooking up my mpu-6050 to read the sensor data.

2

The MPU-6050 is a bit overkill for what you want, you only need the accelerometer bit not the gyro bit.

Does anyone know where I can find some code to calculate the gforce shock force calculated from a drop?

You simply read the device and use the numbers you get to calculate the G force. It is all in the data sheet.

3

Check out the freeIMU site, it's full of MPU6050 based info.

http://www.varesano.net/projects/hardware/FreeIMU

Hint: the gravity in a free fall case is always the same 8)

4

So while I'm waiting for my accelerometer. I was also wondering how can I put this data into a graph. The information is going to be fast so a graph would be great. Am I able to do that with windows?

I think i got most of it ready. Got an Egg (plastic) but a protoboard to fit in. Got an arduino mini, 9v battery and rf transmitter inside. Just need to learn how to send sensor data out from the rf to another arduino which is connected to a computer to graph the data.

I have a raspberry pi, perhaps connecting the receiver to that will be easier to graph (however I only know a bit of code to recieve via arduino). Is it possible to output sensor data to a graph in windows from an arduino (or a linux [aka raspberry pi])

Edit:
Yay figured out how to make my raspberry pi show some data (kind of). Just linking an uno to the pi and using a serial monitor. so not really much...

5

They mention 'processing' on the freeIMU page to show a 3D graph from the MPU6050 data.
It seems to be an open source program, but I haven't put my my hands on it yet.
Someone posted a YouTube Video of the output, using a rasperry pi. So, chances are, there is a source code out there...

6

Processing runs rather slow on the Raspbery Pi, so using a PC would be better.
The other problem with the Pi is Linux, it keeps going away so you need a big buffer. In python you get about a 4K buffer which can be a bit small depending on how you program it.
If you use Pygame only refresh the screen every 100mS or so not when you have new data.