Magnets, from the traditional alnico bar magnets to the modern neodymium magnets, have been of interest to most everyone for decades. The attraction or repulsion of two such magnets when brought close together is particularly interesting. This can be expressed by making quantitative measurements relating magnetic field strength to distance from the magnet.
What does an accelerometer measure? The obvious answer is acceleration, but that's not really true. An accelerometer actually measures normal force or restoring force which we equate to acceleration using the formula, F=ma. This article will explain the fundamental operating principles of accelerometers and answer the question: how does an accelerometer work? We will also investigate the capabilities and drawbacks of accelerometers in certain applications.
You can investigate these concepts on your own using:
In the study of collisions between two carts, it is desirable to collect position data for both carts. This can be done with a pair of Voyagers, each connected to separate devices running the PocketLab app. Starting data collection on both Voyagers by simultaneously clicking data recording on both PocketLab apps is difficult. One cannot view the data on a single device in real time, and analysis of data requires combining data from two separate devices.
It would be nice if one could connect two (or more!) Voyagers to the same device—say to an Android device or an iOS device running an app that could display concurrent data collection from both Voyagers. Such a capability is possible by the use of Phyphox (physical phone experiments), an app developed at the 2nd Institute of Physics of the RWTH Aachen University in Germany. The author of this lesson has been working with a pre-release Android version of this app that supports BLE (Bluet
