Arduino-Based Optical Tachometer

Step 6 Future Steps

The whole point of this was to enable people to measure the motor speed of the Beakman's Motor so they could vary details and measure the effect the changes have on the motor speed and I think this succeeds in providing those measurements.

However two improvements come to mind already. The first would be to easily capture the RPM information so that it could be graphed and averaged. Since it is just numbers coming across a serial port, this shouldn't be hard to do in any language.

The second is to use the Processing language to create a graphical tachometer display, either a big analog dial or a digital display with a graph, to show the data instead of just reading numbers off the serial terminal.

Processing Home Page

Any other ideas?

Here are a few more resources on the motor, including some EE lab handouts where the motor is one of their projects:

Fields and Waves Handout

Comments on Motor Design

A few more pictures are available on my Flickr page.

Another introduction to this project (and other random stuff) can be found on my blog, Avoidance Central.

Comments

[yaly]

can I use a magnet and a reed switch for example on a bike?

[teddanbren]

I need to be able to calculate angular acceleration (which will vary) for calculations after the is there a way to store each RPM reading into either a spreadsheet or .txt file so it can be analyzed in a graphing program?

[os_sanches]

Hi! Can I use this tach to see another rpm measures? the aplication run under windows xp? can you send me this aplication? tks

[CMPalmer]

Yes, you can use it for measuring different kinds of rotational motion. See the later steps. The Arduino application runs under Windows XP, but is compiled to object code for the Arduino. All of the source code and links to the application are included in the Instructable.