Maxwell's Demons

Characterization of the applied low-pass filter.
High severity crash. No strong oscillations are seen.
Oscillations seen in a crash with low severity.

Problem

What it does

Given the data from the accelerometer we determine the angle of the impact, i.e. the angle (or position) where the car was hit.

How we built it

Applying a LowPass filter for getting rid of high frequency noise
Recognizing beginning of the collision
Determine the "first peak" in the signal *we define the "first peak" as the first relevant increase in the signal.
Determine the area enclosed by the curve of the first peak. We believe that this area corresponds to the momentum transfer in the chosen direction.
Knowing the momentum transfer for each direction we are able to calculate the impact angle

Challenges we ran into

Lots of noise and oscillating signals. The oscillations seem to be a fundamental part of the signal. Trying to minimize the them via frequency analysis did not succeed as the signal tends towards zero and all information is lost.