Thursday during the day we worked on our experiment. We spent a long time today trying to melt the wax. We found that a major limitation is that we were not using enough voltage. Instead of using batteries we clipped the leads off some Arduino power supplies and put them in series to jury-rig a 27 volt power supply.
Our attempts at melting wax
We finished off Thursday with a presentation on data analysis by Mike Schmidt. The idea was to use an iPod Touch or iPhone as a data acquisition device. Since it contains an accelerometer (which allows the iPhone to tell which direction is up so it can rotate the screen for your viewing pleasure), one can collect accelerometer data with an iPhone. You can use this to track your acceleration while driving, walking, in an elevator, or on an XCOR glider flight.
