Are smartphone accelerometers useful for vibration characterization?
Are smartphone accelerometers useful for vibration characterization?
(OP)
I've found several accelerometer apps for smartphones (for example http://www.iseismometer.com and http://www.now-instruments.com/products/3-vibsenso... ). Are these useful for doing quantitative vibration analysis, and if not, what are their deficiencies?





RE: Are smartphone accelerometers useful for vibration characterization?
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Of course I can. I can do anything. I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
RE: Are smartphone accelerometers useful for vibration characterization?
RE: Are smartphone accelerometers useful for vibration characterization?
Lazy In = Lazy Out
Walt
RE: Are smartphone accelerometers useful for vibration characterization?
- Steve
RE: Are smartphone accelerometers useful for vibration characterization?
For gathering equipment vibration data, useless. Mainly because of garbage input data.
And you know what they say....G.I.G.O.
RE: Are smartphone accelerometers useful for vibration characterization?
I am constantly checking for handy and useful vibration measurement apps for my Samsung Note II (Android) phone, but nothing was useful to me so far. The internal MEMS accelerometers have very low F-max for machinery vibrations, but may be OK for low frequency structural/seismic vibrations. Another issue is mounting/attaching the phone onto a surface. Finally, I would not trust any of these apps for quantitative measurements without amplitude and frequency calibration against a known good reference. Electricpete and perhaps a few others on Forum have "played" with these apps, so perhaps they can offer 1st hand experience. Probably fun apps to use while riding a roller coaster!
Walt
RE: Are smartphone accelerometers useful for vibration characterization?
I can't imagine anyone with the money for a calibrator would use a phone as a measurement device. I would probably accept the nominal fatory cal and worry more about frequency response (primarily of the fixture).
I'm not quite sure what is meant by frequency calibration - how would you go about fine-tuning the sampling rate of the system?
My main issue with tha apps is data streaming consistency. I've seen drop-outs in the time domain missing/skipped samples). I'm just guessing here, but I think the underlying operating system may not be up to true real-time measurements.
- Steve
RE: Are smartphone accelerometers useful for vibration characterization?
You can get these on a board for about a dollar, so with a 4 dollar TFT screen and a 4 dollar arduino you could build a 6 axis rig for 20 dollars, and probably 20 hours in programming.
Cheers
Greg Locock
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RE: Are smartphone accelerometers useful for vibration characterization?
The biggest restriction I have found is the sampling frequency. I have not managed to get more than 60Hz sampling frequency out of my phone.
The huge advantage of an iPhone is you can just duct tape it to a structure and press the record button. It is orders of magnitude less effort than traditional accelerometers.