Spinning Top: Rotational Speed / Velocity

[das_benni]

Hello ladies and gentleman, iam a ambitious beginner and iam working at a student project. Our project has the topic "Physical Basics with the focus for centripetal and centrifugal force. For our prototype we are looking for a possibility to get the rotational speed of a spinning top. We thought about to check the audio spectrum to get the frequency, but it doesnt work.

Now we thought about to use a visual tracking system and track the rotation of the spinning top with a “highspeed” webcam, perhaps with a gopro?

Do you think it is possible to get the real-time rotation speed of a spinning top with this method? And if it works, perhaps somebody could help me with the application?

Special thanks
Benni

[Meierhans]

The ps3 eye cam can be bought for about 10€ and allows for around 120 FPS. This should be fast enough to measure a larger, not to fast spinnung top. I would simply paint one side black, and the other side white and use pipet node to detect change in lightness. If your spinning top is moving around on table you could paint either the bottom of the top with a saturated color, so you track this part using color tracker and shift the position the pipet is looking at accordingly.

If you run into problems with precision this picture might be an inspiration:

good luck with you project!