AboutMaurice Duteau Expertise As a contract manufacturer, product designer, mechanical engineer, small business owner I know what it takes to get ideas from the drawing board and into production.
Experience My business is located in Shanghai China where I've been doing contract manufacturing for the past 10 years. My experience on the ground in China has given me a good understanding of how things get done over here.
Question Hi Maurice, I am doing a design technology project at school and I was wondering if you could help me.
Basically I have decided to make a punchbag or attachment to a punchbag that would tell the person using it the strength or power of their punch. This could be displayed either electronically like on an LCD Screen or Mechanically.
Unfortunatly I'm not really coming up with any great ideas at the moment so I was wondering if you could tell me how you might go about making a product like mine. Like what it would look like? What materials would it use? How would it measure the punching power etc.
So far my ideas are:
Pressure pads built into the punchbag, The punching power would be displayed via an LCD Screen.
There is a rubber membrane or something elastic on top of an airtight punchbag, When the bag is hit the membrane will expand because the air inside the punchbags air is being displaced. I still don't know how this product will show a reading.
When the punchbag is hit a pendulum swings and this gives a reading (Still need to think about how a pendulum will swing when the bag is hit)
Thank you, Any help you give me will be greatly appreciated.
Alex.
Answer This is a big project but an interesting one.
I'll vote for doing this electronically with the LCD screen for display, this will be a flexible solution. Measure the force with a strain guage, this is going to take some work on how to mount it and get a good reading. Use Omega as a reference to see what's available at least. They're expensive for a school project so I'll suggest you find some other vendors, write to them & let them know the deal: the project will be displayed at a science fair with their logo on it, etc. You could end up with all kinds of free gear & support.
The strain guage will need some electronics. I'll suggest a development kit from one of the CPU vendors... Microchip is not the cheapest but they'll be OK for at the demo phase. There's lots of kits and application notes for their chips.
