Velocity Test Data

On Thursday I re-soldered the EB500 header strip to the PS/2 connector wire.  Abuse/overuse had led to the failure of Chiu Yen's original solder job.

After completing that task and verifying the motor system, we conducted our first test of the truck's performance.  With a stopwatch we measured the time for the truck to travel a pre-determined distance as a function of our input to the speed controller.  I was in charge of recording data; Allen drove the truck via the netbook, ensuring that it accelerated to the target speed before entering the test zone and keeping it on a straight course;  Chiu Yen was the truck retriever and called out when it entered the test zone; and Venkat manned the stopwatch at the end of the test zone.  In this arrangement we conducted fifteen test runs; three each at five input speeds.  The test zone was the carpeted area beside the computers in the MEM UG computer laboratory and measured 2.45 meters in length.  The plot below shows a summary of our data; the average velocity for each control input is plotted along with the standard deviation.