Raspberry Pi based lap counter for amateur car racing
This article presents the design of a lap counter and timer that can be used in amateur car racing. Main functions of this computer to count laps, measure lap time, vehicle speed and accelerations. The system uses a GPS module, accelerometer and magnetometer sensors.
Application of the vehicle navigation via GPS carrier phase
Today, Global Position System (GPS) is extensively employed in navigation and survey systems. Because the GPS can provide navigation data such as position, velocity, attitude and heading of vehicles, its contributions are numerous not only in national defense and military but also in commercial fields. However, GPS is usually used to provide absolute position information. In attitude problems, the inertial navigation system (INS) is usually employed in navigator to solve its attitude. In this paper, the main purpose is to perform the real-time kinematic GPS and the attitude determination using the GPS carrier phase observation. A navigation vehicle has been designed in order to test and verify the accurate performance of the system by the proposed real-time kinematic GPS and attitude determination algorithms. Through some experiments, the proposed approaches satisfy our requirements via the test.
Early Cretaceous Feathers from Victoria
Unusually well preserved fossil feathers from Lower Cretaceous (VaIanginian-Aptian) claystones at Koonwarra, Victoria, are the oldest (c. 110-125 million years) bird remains yet found in the southern hemisphere, They are among the oldest bird remains known in the world, being antedated only by the toothed Archaeopteryx from the late Jurassic of Bavaria, and being more or less the same age as Gallornis from the Lower Cretaceous of France. The Victorian fossil feathers are evidence for essentially worldwide distribution of birds soon after the beginning of the Cretaceous, if not before. The feathers could conceivably have come from toothed birds.