Development of the Berry Impact Recording Device sensing system: Software

This paper reports a complete impact data acquisition, processing, and analyzing software system that applies on the hardware platform of the Berry Impact Recording Device (BIRD). The software has three major sections that correspond to the hardware: The BIRD sensor program, the interface box program, and the computer software i-BIRD. The sensor program samples acceleration data from three axes and records them as single impacts with a maximum sampling rate of 3.0 kHz. Users can configure the sensor via the i-BIRD computer software, with different options of sampling frequencies (682-3050 Hz) and thresholds (0-205 g, where g is the gravitational acceleration). The data recorded can be downloaded, processed and graphically displayed on the computer. A real time clock was created using the interrupt service routine provided by the microcontroller. The accuracy of the sensor’s clock was calibrated with an error of 0.073%, which was adequate to record impact data in this application. The shape of impact curves recorded by the BIRD sensor at three sampling frequencies (682, 998, and 1480 Hz) matched well with the curves recorded by a high frequency (10 kHz) data logger with the maximum root mean squared error of 4.4 g. The velocity change had a relative error less than 5%. With confirmation of all those performances, the software system enabled the BIRD to be a useful tool to collect impact data during small fruit (such as blueberry) mechanical harvest.