The Coefficient of restitution by Microcontrollers

The project began with the traditional setup for a coefficiency of restitution experiment that is failing and has been abandoned by students of Advanced Lab, which was a call for a major upgrade. After the project is complete, the experimental set-up now has a completely new circuitry with calibrated frequency responses, the ability to handle a wider range of inputs, a digitizer circuit, an Arduino and an accompanying program for data acquisition and a Python GUI that takes in data via serial connection from the Arduino, plots the live data and analyzes it to find the coefficient of resitution. The goal of the project was to reignite students' interest in the classical experiment, expose students to microcontrollers and give students an opportunity to learn how to program parts of a system to work together, all at a very small cost compared to previous setups using NI devices and Matlab interfaces.