Attention, adventuresome engineers and makers. You can learn a lot about the world around you, and have some extreme experiences, with SparkFun’s OpenLog Artemis.
There are an infinite number of questions to be asked about the world around us. Why is my mail damaged when it is delivered? Where did the damage occur, and how large was the force? When is it reliably warm enough to bring my tomato plants outside in the spring? What is the optimal speed at which to enter a 360 spin on a drift trike? To answer such questions, you need data, which, as you know, can at times be very difficult to capture But you're in luck! With the SparkFun OpenLog Artemis, you can tackle countless projects. Read the free article.
Datalogging with OpenLog Artemis
As a stand-alone device, OpenLog Artemis automatically logs from an on-board triple-axis accelerometer, gyro, and magnetometer. However, it can auto-detect practically any additional Qwiic sensor ranging from LiDAR distance sensing, u-blox GPS modules, weather sensors, or whatever fits the project. Plus, it writes the data to a microSD card in CSV format (comma-separated values) to make the data easy to manipulate and understand.
Two projects are covered in the article. Project 1 involves using OpenLog Artemis to analyze the optimal speed for pulling 360s on a drift trike. For Project 2, two SparkFun innovators use OpenLog Artemis to explore mineshaft air quality.
Trike Drifting with OpenLog Artemis
Drift tricycles (trikes) have low traction rear wheels made of PVC so that the you can intentionally lose traction and counter-steer down steep, paved hills. "Basically, you send a drift trike down a very steep downhill, in which the rider drifts around corners, or brakes by doing a 360," write Avra Saslow, who used the OpenLog Artemis to collect the data and understand it. "For this project we didn’t even need to connect additional sensors — its built-in ICM-20948 Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) 9-Degrees- Of-Freedom (9-DOF) sensor has all the sensing capabilities we’ll need."
Getting ready to bomb down a road and do a 360!
Mineshaft Exploration with OpenLog Artemis
For this project, Saslow to explored an old Colorado mineshaft along with an OpenLog Artemis. She connected additional sensors (e.g., humidity, air quality, and distance) to help determine the cave's height and its general air quality.
"I didn’t venture far, but I was mostly interested in air quality in the mine; these mines are notorious for having a wide variety of toxic elements seeping out of the ground, and I was curious if that fostered any kind of life that might affect the air quality," she explained. "Furthermore, since it remains fairly wet, dark, and dank, I hypothesized that the higher the humidity levels were, the poorer the air quality levels would be too.
The mineshaft selected to do the air quality data logging experiment using OpenLog Artemis.
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