Where do I find information about gyroscopes?

[omgwtfitsp]

I'm doing a physics fair on gyroscopes but I absolutely can not find good organized information. I looked up almost every link from a google search but most sites are crappy. I even looked in 2 libraries but no books are found.

How can this be? I thought gyroscopes have been out for a long time enough for someone to have written a good deal of information on it.

Does anyone know where I can get better information? I'm not looking for complex info that gets into the equations or anything but rather just the basic physics principles on how gyroscopes work.

Any one know where I can find a good source of information?

* Sorry if this is in the wrong section

 

[AlephZero]

Try searching for the dynamics of rotating machinery, or looking for books on dynamics at university BS level.

You may have to search around to find good sites that do the math in a "simple" way, rather than jumping straight into vector calculus which you might not understand.

You might have better luck with old engineering dynamics books (say from the 1950s or 60s) which would more likely to use straightforward notation rather than vectors.

 

[Curl]

Maybe you aren't searching for the right thing, nobody wrote about "gyroscopes" as you want it because it is simply part of the general case of rotating rigid bodies.

If you just look for that I'm sure you'd find a TON of material. You need to be familiar with angular momentum and basic vector algebra or else its a waste.

Wiki has it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyroscope

 

[rcgldr]

This site has a series of old videos about gyroscopes, but doesn't contain any real explanation of precession, although the videos are interesting.

http://www.gyroscopes.org/1974lecture.asp

 

[Yuqing]

I find this site to be very instructive

http://www.cleonis.nl/physics/phys256/gyroscope_physics.php"

and I believe the author, Cleonis, also attends these forums.

 

[Cleonis]

I'm doing a physics fair on gyroscopes but I absolutely can not find good organized information. [...]

Yuqing already mentioned the page on my website, and I have benefitted a lot from material created by professor Eugene Butikov and his co-workers.
- http://faculty.ifmo.ru/butikov/Applets/Precession.html"
- http://faculty.ifmo.ru/butikov/Applets/Gyroscope.html"