Need help about coupled pendulum

[christian_zan04]

i am assigned to perform an experiment on coupled pendulum using a motion sensor program. the set-up is basically consist of a computer with a motion sensor program, a camera, and the coupled pendulum. i just want to ask what will be the best thing to investigate or experiment about with the set-up provided. if possible can you provide a detailed discussion.

thanks.

 

[olgranpappy]

Why don't you use your apparatus to measure the mass of the Higgs boson. The experiment would be utterly trivial for you to set up and would provide a great service to the scientific community.

Sorry, I can't go into a detailed discussion at this time, but I'm sure you can just figure it out by yourself.

 

[LHarriger]

You could set the pedulum to swing in its two normal modes and then measure the eigenfrequency of each mode.
Do you have to write the motion sensor program yourself?
If so then I recommend greyscale mixing your RGB bitmap and then normalizing the array values to be between 0 and 1. This makes for a very robust computational mesh.
If you subtract every frame from the original frame then you will get a null array that only "sees" values where change has occurred, ie: motion.
All of the legwork can be done quite easily using DataTank. Check it out at
http://www.visualdatatools.com/
Matlab could be used, but DataTank is designed specifically for visual apps.