On Thu, 22 Aug 2002, Bob Japundza wrote:

>I am working with a piezo gyro that puts out a bit of noise/jitter in its
>output.  I have a couple of different op-amp filter circuits I've thrown
>together to see how well they clean up the output of the gyro, but at the
>same time not screw with the bandwidth of the gyro's output.  The gyro
>puts out approximately 2.5v at a steady state, and goes up/down from
>there depending on the direction of rotation.  I have been trying to
>measure the noise level of the output with my scope without success; I
>assume it is because I don't have anything to trigger off of.  My guess

Hang the gyro on a pendulum with fairly short period (1 second or less).
This if you lack a shaker table with twist mode. You can make a pendulum
easily. You can also build a proper table using a speed regulated motor to
drive its end through a pushrod. Make sure it works smoothly.  The
pendulum is FAR simpler to make and needs no motor. You will have several
tens of seconds to do measurements and you can deduce the sensitivity and
other things very accurately (if you use something accurate to find the
period - like a single photodetector and measure the time for both sides
of the movement). The same detector can also measure pendulum speed (since
the beam interrupter is of finite size), which gives amplitude, which
gives maximum angle which allows you to compute sensitivity etc etc.

Peter

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