Experimental

Determining the Position of a Coffee Filter in Freefall with an Arduino

The goal of this section is to use an Arduino microcontroller and a distance sensor to determine the position of stacks of coffee filters in freefall. See the resources tab for technical documentation on the Arduino and the distance sensor.

A single coffee filter has some mass and some surface area. These factors contribute to the amount of drag the coffee filter experiences and to the terminal velocity of the coffee filter. When multiple coffee filters are stacked the mass changes but the surface area does not. Thus this will be an interesting experiment as to how mass affects drag.

Set-Up

The equipment you are given for this experiment is an Arduino microcontroller, a distance sensor, and a "hat" for your Arduino which allows an SD card to be inserted. You also have a few jumper cables and a serial USB cable. If you have not already, install the Arduino IDE software, located here.

Documentation for all of the components is provided in the resources tab for this experiment. Your goal is to set up the Arduino such that the readings from the distance sensor are recorded and stored on the SD card. You will want to store both the time and the current distance reading for later data analysis.

Deliverable #6: Provide a pin diagram or a photo of your final set-up and a screenshot of the code that is needed to collect position data from the distance sensor and save it to the SD card.

The Experiment

Record the mass of one coffee filter, a stack of three coffee filters, a stack of five coffee filters, a stack of seven coffee filters, and a stack of ten coffee filters.

Place the distance sensor at least two meters off the ground. Record the position of one coffee filter as it falls from the distance sensor to the ground. Repeat this two more times so that you have three data sets in total.

Repeat the above process for the different stacks of coffee filters. You should end up with 15 data sets in total before moving on to the data analysis portion.