Wednesday, February 13, 2013

More Testing V3 Power Meter and ADS1247

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Some longer testing (1.5 hours) today and I’ve come to a few conclusions.

  1. My calibration is off
  2. It doesn’t matter that my calibration is off, the crank shear gauge on the inside of the driven arm to measure torque can be skewed by adding a twisting moment to your ankle.
  3. As a result my power balance and power numbers are all wrong! And WAY off from the method of calculating averaged (non-accelerating) power for my Kurt Kinetic Road Trainer.

So I will be adding new strain gauges to V3 on the top and bottom of the crank arm. The arrangement removes bending so it will stabilize and remove this issue. I had said previously that it is the superior arrangement. I didn’t want to have to use two different types of gauges but my hand has been forced. However this raises the question about Stages power meter. What is their arrangement? I suspect it is not a shear arrangement, but rather a double bending arrangement but still on the back side of the crank. It’d lose sensitivity but gains in accuracy.

The ADS1247 is reading out. It’s looking noiser than I want, but this might be a function of my protoboard / power supply / poor wiring / random resistors used as a voltage divider. I still can’t find a potentiometer around my apartment anywhere even though I bought and wired one up specifically for testing months ago. I’ll make a trip to the dollar store tomorrow and hope

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