The purpose of this lab was to be able to explore newtons second law, Force = Mass x Acceleration. To show this, we used one of the NXT’s and hooked it up to a pulley that lifted up weight. With Labview, Dr. Shatz also had a program that enabled us to edit the power in which it took the NXT motor to pull up the weights. With this, data can be recorded in how long it took for the motor to pull up the weights and how much energy was used, etc.
With the data gathered, we moved all of the data onto an excel sheet which allowed us to graph out the data. The best possible result for the data was to have a line in two graphs, one line was when the power stayed the same, but the mass was edited, and the other line was when the power changed, but the mass was constant. The results for both of the graphs were fair, one graph yielded a perfect 1, and the other graph was a 0.9343.
Overall, this was a very nice lab which explained F=ma, but there were some problems. A problem my group ran across was not stopping the NXT with the button, but trying to stop it with the program itself. This ended up with the data getting corrupted, and having problems. Also, the data could be less accurate, as sometimes the pulley didn’t stop where we anticipated it would therefore making the run last longer than it should have or shorter than it should have.
