6-DOF Accelerometer/Gyro Data Acquisition System

Overview

Motorsport data acquisition system capable of monitoring 3-axis acceleration and rotation. Can be used to characterize performance metrics such as peak longitudinal acceleration, brake performance, and tire friction coefficient estimation.

Data Acquisition Prototype Board
DAQ system on protoboard

Key Specifications

  • GY-521 board equipped with MPU-6050 IMU
  • 16-Bit Data @ 1 kHz
  • CAN-bus enabled for communication with rest of vehicle data acquisition system
  • Designed to be expanded for use with future sensors (e.g. linear suspension travel monitors)
  • Savitzky-Golay filtering to extract useful info from noisy source data

This system was designed for race vehicles, and allowed either the driver or an outside engineer to begin logging acceleration and gyroscope data. This data was made available on the vehicle CAN-bus network, and also logged on an SD card for later export. Raw data provided by this system was extremely noisy, and discretized due to its digital format, so a Savitzky-Golay filter was applied across the set, implemented in MATLAB.

excerpt of MATLAB post-processing code

The filter was tuned both by calibrating with known accelerations from references, as well as comparison to acceleration data taken from other sensing systems (e.g. onboard filtered acceleration data from a GoPro) operating in parallel with the new system. Once calibrated, data was visualized once again using MATLAB.