PROCRASTINATION FTL!

This blog is more of a life lesson than anything math related. That lesson is to not procrastinate, just in case the time on this blog didn't say that already. Enjoy our misery Mr. Hnidei, you did warn us.

(FTL=For the LOSS)

Due Date Tomorrow!

Today is our final day for revision and we're going over the report to make sure we don't have any mistakes and to make sure we didn't forget anything. The experiment was surprising fun to do together and we all enjoyed it (with the except of the write-up maybe). Considering the fact that today is our final day, I think it is safe to say this will be our final post as well. In conclusion we will leave you with what the experiment was all about, the equation of the relationship between the tension in a guitar string and its frequency. From our calculations we concluded this to be y=28.016x^0.4999 where y is the frequency in Hertz and x is the tension in newtons. We hope anyone who stumbles across this blog is able to get something out of it.

Signing off!

Due Date Approaching!

We're into our final week and the only additional work to be done is some of the write up. There really aren't any new and exciting developments to bestow upon all you followers(Just us and Mr.Hnidei eventually). Anyways, we are hoping to finish the write up completely within the next day or so and save the last few for revision!

Testing Complete!

We completed the experimental portion of the FSE today and accumulated all the necessary data. We were amazed with how accurate the microphone and software were. Not a single trial deviated more than 1% from the average which is fantastic. Once we had all the data in tables we graphed it using Excel and it closely resembles a root curve. Here is the table of experimental data we gathered:
















And here is the graph!

How the new setup works

This is just a follow up post to show the new placement of the setup as well as to show how it works.

Ingenuity beats pesky problems

After being plagued with problems from yesterday's testing, we met up again today to see what we could do. The first thing we did was try to find a more appropriate place to mount the setup so that it stationary and unimpeded. When searching for a perfect spot we managed to solve more than one problem at the same time. First of all, based on the design of the setup, its quite apparent that mounting it to the roof would be ideal. Lucky for us, there was an available spot on the roof of my basement. This spot happened to be located right next to an air duct. When considering that the emitting sound was a little too quiet, the idea of using the air duct as an amplifier came to mind. This new setup was not only perfectly stationary, but the sound was amplified quite a significant amount.

Also, tampering around with computer software in place of the guitar tuner looks to be the better alternative. Certain software is able to isolate the primary frequency and ignore any external noise pollution, which makes it a much more practical choice.

Problems along the way

Today we began testing and accumulating data for our new proposal of string tension vs frequency. To be honest, the day was very unsuccessful. We had lots of trouble with keeping the setup stationary, generating a loud sound, and accurately measuring the frequency. We were unable to find a good place to mount the setup so we had to make do with simply resting the brackets on two tables positioned beside each-other. Also, it was very difficult to strum/pluck the string hard enough without disturbing and altering the setup. Another pain was the frequency measurer(guitar tuner). All other sounds and interference had to be eliminated to even get a reading, which was a huge pain. To overcome this last problem, we've been tampering with computer software in place of the guitar tuner. We plan on getting together tomorrow once again to deal with these problems.