Raspberry Pi Forums

I am currently in 11th grade living in the United States and I am looking for ideas on how I can relate the Raspberry Pi to Physics and make it enjoyable for me. Aiming to major in Computer Science (specifically engineering), I would love to work with the Raspberry Pi. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any Google School fundings around here, and the School Board is not to fond with the product or modern technology in general.

I would be very pleased if people could post some ideas that I could relate to Physics using the Raspberry Pi! Currently, I was thinking of making a FM radio station and adding songs to the SD card and playing music around the school. Let me know if this is possible or a good idea. I am trying my best to afford a Pi, but I don't know how possible that will be.

Thanks for your support!

(sorry i'm kind of a lurker, so this is my first post!)

Figure out how photodiodes or phototransistors can be used to detect light or dark. Buy some, and whatever other components you need to make a circuit.

Buy a Pi.

Hook up a photodiode circuit to a GPIO pin on the Pi. Verify that the GPIO state correctly indicates whether the photodiode is in light or darkness. Now do this for 8 or more photodiodes.

Get a wooden metre stick (or yardstick I suppose).

Drill some holes, evenly spaced along the stick. Push the photodiodes into the holes and wire them back to the Pi.

Stand the stick up vertically.

Drop a ball in front of the stick. As the ball falls it should block the light reaching each photodiode in turn. You can detect this with the Pi.

Write a program to measure the time that each sensor is triggered and then use the data to calculate g, the acceleration due to gravity (hey! It's physics!).

That's idea #1. Hopefully someone else will suggest more, and you can choose the one you like best.

Oh, and I have deliberately glossed over some of the tricky parts. You can figure out the answers yourself. And yes, you could do this with an Arduino.

For extra points, travel around the world with your apparatus and demonstrate that g is not constant across the earth's surface.

That sounds like a really good idea that is actually measurable and possible! Thanks!

Make a rocket or water rocket simulator.

At some point I plan to make a water rocket simulator myself.
The user will be able to select rocket body sizes, water and pressure amount, nozzle design - SWOOSH!
The fun part will be tweaking the formulas to real world data.