Measuring Paper Plane Speed with SPIKE Prime Line Graphs

Key Takeaways

g'day everyone today we are in my backyard to learn how to build a light gate using the new graphing features in spike prime so before we do our experiment to see how fast our paper airplane is flying we need to create our light game now you can see here this is a very simple build okay so all it is is the hub in the middle of this plate and we are going to create these two sensors okay we got a blue sensor over here this light color sensor and also this red sensor over here this color coded system is going to be important for us later on okay as a guide what we want to do is we want to create this light gate so that the sensors are as far apart as possible but still close enough for us to measure that paper airplane so because the paper airplane is going to be quite erratic when it's flying um we want to still be able to cut through both of these sensors when it flies through if the sensors are too far apart then it's going to be really difficult for you to fly an airplane straight through but if you were measuring something else like a cart or some sort of bicycle or something like that then then yeah you can have them much further apart and then what we need to do is uh do some very simple code using the new spike prime graphing tools so the code is going to be really easy but in order to access our graphing tools we need to show the block extensions so go to the bottom left here click on show block extensions and then you click on line graph here press line graph and then you close the window now we are going to scroll down and then you'll see that we have some new blocks here so this is plotting a line graph now what we want to do is that when we start our program we want to clear our our line graph in case we've plotted anything already and then we're going to have a forever loop after that we go back down to our line graph blocks and then we're going to plot two things uh one on the blue line and one on a red line now remember i said that we have two color sensors one on a blue clip and one on a red clip that is what these are going to be representing so that we know which uh which color sensor corresponds to which graph so we want the blue one to be our port a so we go into sensors and then we want to measure a's reflect the light intensity and then for the second one we wanted to be measuring port b's light intensity and that's it so when this program starts it's going to clear the line graph and on on your on your graph if it's already drawn anything but then after that it's going to start plotting for a and b so let's download it onto your hub and then let's go outside and test it out we are going to see if we can calculate how fast this paper airplane is flying as it travels past this light gate and then afterwards i'm going to show you how to do the calculations in order to calculate the average speed of your paper airplane [Music] now that we've finished our experiment we're going to bring back our spike prime hub and we're going to plug it in and try to download our information so let's uh get our usb cable uh make sure spike primer is open and then let's plug it in okay so the device is plugged in perfectly fine you can see that our sensors are here it's working as expected so now we want to get the data that was plotted when we were outside so here down the bottom left there is this little graphing symbol so we click on that and then there's uh nothing here at the moment what you need to do is press this full screen button after you press the full screen button you'll start to see things that we can access here so in down the bottom there is this import button we click on import and then choose your hub click on our hub and then you'll see that this is the data from the different lines that we were graphing from before so this blue line and the red line so we select everything and then we press import give it a few seconds here we go so while i was outside uh like i said the airplane is pretty erratic so there's a lot of attempts here but uh i couldn't see uh any really successful uh attempts except for this one little one over here so i'm gonna drag a section around my good data and then i let go yeah all right so now we have these two little blips okay this represents when uh the airplane cut through the blue gate and then the airplane cutting through the red gate so you choose a a place on both of these blips okay so and then we have to try to remember that reading so here is the start of my my blue reading and i'm going to record it as 26.832 seconds so this is 26.832 seconds since the program started running so i'm just going to note this down myself and then it cuts through the red gate at 27.032 seconds so that is the time difference in order to measure the speed we need to detect the distance over time okay so now we have the time readings from looking at the graph but now we need to get the distance between our two sensors and this is an important part of our experiment so we need to make sure we're measuring from the same part of each sensor uh as as accurately as possible so i get my tape measure here and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to measure from this this end of each sensor so it's this end of this sensor and then this end of the red sensor don't measure the outside of both sensors because then you'll be off you have to measure from the same spot of each sensor in order to get an accurate reading so here i'm going to use my tape measure 30.5 centimeters so now we have everything we need in order to calculate that average speed of that airplane as it was flying through this light game the distance that it traveled was 30.5 centimeters and the time is the difference between the red reading and the blue reading point two seconds we can multiply that by five okay so um uh if you if you had another different reading then what you'll need to do is you'll need to divide one second by however many fractions of a second that that you have okay so but uh what we have is point two so we need to multiply the result by 5 and then we'll get meters per second that equals 152.5 centimeters per second so that's 1.525 meters per second and that's it that's how you build a very simple white gate and that's how you calculate the average speed between the likely of anything you can use a paper airplane you can build a little car and see how fast they go or you can measure something in real life maybe you can try and do some of your own experiments with this so i hope you enjoyed it i hope it was helpful and i'll see you next time [Music] you