Setup

Hardware Setup:

In order to record data, we used a fairly simple electrical system. The full system is pictured below:

Components:

Micro-controller - We used a SparkFun Pro Micro as the brains of our robot. This stored the code and connected the other devices.

IMU - We used a SparkFun IMU Breakout to record data from our flight. The board contains a 3-axis accelerometer, a 3-axis gyroscope, and a 3-axis magnetometer.

Micro SD Card Mount - We used a SparkFun Level Shifting microSD Breakout to store the data from our IMU during flight, removing the need for a wired connection. After recording data, we simply plugged the SD card into our computer to retrieve the data.

Battery - We used four AA batteries to power our system. They provided ~6V, which was plenty to power our 3.3V system (The micro-controller regulated its own input voltage)

We wanted to keep the weight and size of our hardware system to a minimum so it wouldn't have any significant adverse effect to the performance of the Frisbee either in someone's hand or in flight. Since we were not investigating aerodynamics or equations of motion, this was mostly a factor for use, rather than something that would need to be compensated for mathematically in the analysis.

Software Setup:

The software we used to collect data was fairly straightforward.

The IMU writes data to the serial monitor, and the SD card reads the serial monitor and stores the output. Nine columns of data are recorded, 3 each for the accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer in the form of a .csv. Notably, we had to adjust the settings on the sensor to accomodate the rapid rotation of the disk; the default maximum of 250 degrees per second was much too slow, so we bumped it up to 2000 degrees per second.

The source code for data collection can be found here.