Punch Accelerator Used for Measuring Punch Intensity

Overview

The project shows the power of a punch by displaying the hit expressed in numbers as the project uses an Arduino and an accelerometer.

Details

The Arduino platform is the basis of the design since it is a microcontroller board that contains java based PC software for compilation and upload, USB based serial interface, and power supply circuit. Due to the availability of standard components/shields and the ease of use, this platform has become very known as it makes the punch acceleration sensor to be implemented as a shield.

A single axis accelerometer on a chip is used by the device in order to function where the chip produces an analog voltage indicating the amount of either positive or negative acceleration. The ADXL193 gets connected to the main unit as it comes in only in a surface mounted package. A fast A/D converter is used to convert the signal to digital as the microcontroller reads it and computes the greatest acceleration in gravity which is shown on a multi-segment LED display. Most of the LED display is being driven by a shift register since microcontroller does not have enough digital output pins.