Mr RB
Well-Known Member
My friend who owns a large mechanical engineering workshop has built a 1000 hp drag bike. I designed the microcontroller electronics and display unit for his 1200 hp dyno and now he seems to think I can make anything...
He needs a sensor to measure ground speed of the drag bike and connect it the onboard datalogger.
Typically they use a third wheel, on a sprung lever to contact the ground. This is done because on a drag bike the back wheel will be spinning and/or grows in size at speed so it is useless for speed feedback. Likewise the front wheel probably won't touch the ground reliably until the last half of the quarter mile.
So before he builds a complex sprung lever system with a little sensor wheel on it I thought it might be good to explore the options of making some type of optical sensor or other non-contact ground speed sensor. Obviously things like GPS are not going to give the very fast accurate data needed for 100 samples/second.
I seem to remember someone modifying an optical mouse sensor to use as a surface speed sensor, does anyone have any experience with this? Or can you suggest another option?
Thanks!
He needs a sensor to measure ground speed of the drag bike and connect it the onboard datalogger.
Typically they use a third wheel, on a sprung lever to contact the ground. This is done because on a drag bike the back wheel will be spinning and/or grows in size at speed so it is useless for speed feedback. Likewise the front wheel probably won't touch the ground reliably until the last half of the quarter mile.
So before he builds a complex sprung lever system with a little sensor wheel on it I thought it might be good to explore the options of making some type of optical sensor or other non-contact ground speed sensor. Obviously things like GPS are not going to give the very fast accurate data needed for 100 samples/second.
I seem to remember someone modifying an optical mouse sensor to use as a surface speed sensor, does anyone have any experience with this? Or can you suggest another option?
Thanks!