- How can I make a simple animation that approximates the path of the centerline of the RMT rope motion? Is there an example of this helical path somewhere?
Unfortunately, I can't say I'm familiar with this type of motion and don't know how to parameterize it—if you make your own thread here on Wolfram Community, I don't doubt that somebody might be able to figure it out. It kinda looks like a lemniscate that oscillates ~sinusoidally in height? See my attached notebook for some thoughts.
- I'd like to compute a path based on the approximate forces on the rope, and show the resistance/reactance forces in a separate panel. I'd like to show the phase relationship between resistance/reactance, but not freak out people unfamiliar with the complex number representation of impedance. Suggestions?
Rather than using complex numbers, you could always explicitly break it down into real and imaginary components and only talk about them in real terms. In some cases there's no avoiding it, but you should be good to "brush away" most of the "complexity" here, right?
- Does Mathematica provide a way to visually capture the 3D path of [a marked] centerline of the rope? I may need to stitch the inputs from multiple cameras together? I was thinking of producing a 3DP of this captured path.
If the video were 3D (or a sequence of 3D images), sure—but otherwise, there's not a good way to do this from a 2D video. I suppose if you had a marking which was sufficiently large, a high enough framerate, and good camera placement, you could do it with one video. With two cameras, yes—you could measure (say) x-y motion in one video and z in the other, then put those tracked positions together. Consider a function like ImageKeypoints; you may have to do a little putzing with it but extracting this sort of data from a well-composed video (or videos) is possible, and I've done it.
Of note, you can also use Wolfram Language's Dynamic functionality to read in instrument outputs in real-time, so if you had some other way to measure, that could also work.
One unrelated request: can you capture an audio sample from your cat and show us a Fourier transform of it for the study group? Do we look at Fourier transforms? Maybe your cat just wants to contribute to the presentation. Meeeeeow.
We may briefly discuss them later in the sessions, as I do have an Images, Audio, and Video notebook that I wrote—I'll add an official Meechy Meow.
