A low-cost car vibration acquisition system

The paper presents an acquisition system, intended to be used for recording the vibrations of the vehicles. The system can be used in easy-to-mount experiments, for assessment of the status of the pavement, status of the vehicle and comfort of the passengers. It is intended to allow an alternative to the large and expensive systems performing off-line vehicle vibrations measurements. It also can add valuable information to on-road evaluation of the pavement status. The main advantages of this system are: portable, easy to deploy in a regular car, small size components, easy to use acquisition and recording software. The small size and cheap MEMS accelerometers were chosen, instead of the expensive position and acceleration transducers, used in industrial diagnosis equipment. This is possible because the useful vibration spectrum of the cars does not exceed 100-200Hz. The modules are small-size, SMD technology, for reducing the influence on the vibration mass. The communication between the sensors and the central node uses the RS485 bus, which allows a simple protocol, on a reduced number of wires. The system was tested on real vehicles and the measured parameters were experimentally validated.