SparkFun Forums

[tristanantonsen]

Hello! I'm a student in engineering and am on a project where I need to use accelerometers to measure small vibrations. From what I can tell, the ADXL377 seems to be what I'm looking for, but I'm not sure if it has the sensitivity I need.

The vibrations I need to measure are around 1-200 Hz, and I see that the bandwidth is from .5 to 550 or 1600 Hz, but I'm not sure if that's the same thing. I read on another post that it is also necessary to use a raspberry pi, because Arduinos don't have enough memory, I believe. Also, the accelerations will be quite small, possibly under 1 g. Will this be a usable accelerometer? If not, could you please point me toward a different one that might work for my purposes?

Thank you!

[jremington]

The ADX377 is designed for 200g measurements and is the wrong accelerometer for your application. You may be thinking of the ADXL337 (+/- 3g range at maximum sensitivity), but there are many others.

To measure 200 Hz vibrations you need to sample at 400 Hz or higher, and the bandwidth should be set to 200 Hz.

Memory becomes an issue when you need many samples. For the Arduino Uno (2K bytes RAM), depending on the program, the limit might be around 1500 one-byte samples in one sampling period (3-4 seconds).

[tristanantonsen]

I did in fact mean the ADXL377. Will that work with the parameters you suggested? Also, what sort of arduino would work? Thanks!

[jremington]

Any Arduino can read the accelerometer output.