This past week in class, we worked on a project that was an energy experiment. The project played off a bit of the lego robot experiment that we worked on in previous weeks, and the way in which it went together was that we took the body part of the robot, that which held the battery, and used it to power the pulley in this project.
It was cool to see how everything we’ve done and learned so far has tied together.
To start the project we first set it up, each group had a stand with a string pulley and a set of weights, the pulley then connected to the battery from the lego robot and that then connected to the computer. We controlled the entire thing using the labview on the computer that is where we could change the speed of the pulley and if we took weight off or put weight on we would record it here so the system knew.
Some main points of the project are the following:
- We kept track of the weight- the power of the battery is in millivolts.
- The timer recorded how fast it went.
- We kept track of the number of rotations that the pulley had
- we measured the rotations of the wheel divided by 360 which equaled how many turns took place
- The 60 seconds is was on divided by 60= 1 minute
- The number of wheel turns divided by the number of minutes equaled RPM (rotations per minute)
- Velocity divided by time = acceleration
- RPM divided by time = acceleration
In this project we were exploring Newtons law F=Ma
So, the point of the project was to A) look at the mass when the power level is constant and B) look at the power level when the mass is constant.
Sadly, at the very end of our experiment we discovered something was faulty we aren’t sure whether it was the computer or the battery but something wouldn’t record correctly so we have our data that we used but it didn’t process in to an excel sheet like it was supposed to so for that, I have our professors’ examples to show you how it should of come out and looked.
We started out keeping the constant mass at .235, and we saw that the power level went to .215kg and .195 kg. and when we kept the power level constant at 5 the mass went to 75, 65, and then 55.
These are the results we would of gotten if our experiment didn’t get messed up :/
I like how you organized this blog, making it clear and easy to read. I also really like the screen shot of the excel page, it makes this experiment understandable. I also think its important that you mentioned that the experiment got messed up, and how it should look because not all experiments are going to work out perfectly. Great Job!
I like how you broke down the different points of the experiment, and put in the information from the example even though there were problems with your information. I also love your enthusiasm! Keep up the good work, Emily!