I started going to the Da Vinci club in the senior school after my brother told me about it as it sounded like something right up my street. Although I wasn't there at the beginning when the project was chosen I am now quite involved in making a telemetry device to put inside a soap box car to measure its speed. the plan is to do this with an accelerometer connected to a raspberry pi.
One of the first challenges was re-imaging a Raspberry Pi Zero with the latest build of the operating system. Once that was up and running we were able to install the drivers for the accelerometer. however the system did not work reliably and would frequently crash. This soon became clear as it only crashed when it was moved (not a good feature of a accelerometer). After some investigation we tracked the problem down to a dry solder joint on the accelerometer board which I was able to fix with a soldering iron.
The next big challenge is how to convert the accelerometer output to a reliable speed and communicate this data wirelessly to a laptop.
I am pleased that I managed to fix the hardware bug a it enabled us to get the basic system up and running and provide a continuous stream of accelerometer data. This project has also taught me alot about how to configure a Raspberry Pi which has helped me massively with my BrachioGraph project.