I am looking at using the phone for G measurement. I found this app for android.
Has anyone else got experience with using a phone?
Just installed this on my S23
and it seems to work well (these are not my landings, honest)
One has to select the highest recording speed to have any chance of capturing the sort of transients during a landing IMHO.
The app is quite difficult to get data from.
I did a fairly firm landing but really nothing “hard” and got this
which shows a spike about 0.8g over the 1g baseline. Would you call that 1.8g or 0.8g?
It does correctly record a 60 degree level turn as 2G
It is obvious that to get decent data from this thing you need to carefully choose the filter characteristics. In say a car phone holder there is a huge amount of noise – about 0.5G peak to peak – and it is basically useless.
Peter wrote:
which shows a spike about 0.8g over the 1g baseline. Would you call that 1.8g or 0.8g?
1.8g
Do the panel mount G meters capture just a peak for the whole flight or do they indicate the instantaneous G?
Peter wrote:
Do the panel mount G meters capture just a peak for the whole flight or do they indicate the instantaneous G?
Guess what? It depends on the model… and there a quite a few of those.
The one I have (AV-20S) only gives a warning when approaching the preset level, though peaks can be read too.
@sebastian_g g load and generally logging and exporting would be a nice feature for the ADL.
Peter wrote:
Do the panel mount G meters capture just a peak for the whole flight or do they indicate the instantaneous G?
The mechanical ones typically have a needle that shows instantaneous and another needle (actually two) that shows minimum and maximum reached (and there’s a reset button).
At least some of the Insight GEM engine monitors (G3, G4) do things like engine vibration, take-off g-force and two-axis turbulence which includes g-forces at landing.
For details see: Operating Instructions for GEM G1..G4
Not sure if the Landing Height System from Microkit measures g-loads…
Looking at the data I am capturing with the phone app, I think people must be doing some clever filtering to end up with something meaningful – because there is a lot of noise just with the phone lying on your kneeboard, and it differs from the phone being say on your leg. But on any “flexible” surface (like a leg) it bounces around, especially on landing, so I think any G measurement must use an airframe-fixed sensor, and then appropriately filter the data.
