DIY. Physics laboratory
We started a small educational project. A short ride to the Vernisage flea market brought us:
⚗️ Holder for chemistry experiments
⚗️ 5 springs
⚗️ old Soviet set of weights
In a chat session with ChatGPT we explained that we aim at a worldwide site on which one can start the camera, point it at an oscillating object, get the time dependence of its displacement, extract frequencies from the signal and track experiment results. Iron Friend gave unexpected comment that putting a bright spot on the oscillating object can save us tons of work.
After some adjustments we finally got the result on the photos. Program detects the red spot on the picture, creates a mask (on the right) and writes the dependence of the vertical coordinate for the center of mass versus time. Lower image - the recorded curve.
Next steps:
📟 Calculate frequencies of components (Prony's algorithm)
📈 Track frequency change versus mass change
In general, I want to use this setup to cover the following topics:
✒️ frequency dependence on mass for elastic restoring force
✒️ frequency dependence on pendulum length
✒️ expressions for effective spring constant for series and parallel spring connections
The current state of the project