Vehicle monitoring device
First Claim
1. A vehicle monitoring device comprising:
- an accelerometer; and
processing means, responsive to said accelerometer, for;
(1) averaging out decelerating peaks and troughs occurring during a time interval of predetermined length, (2) repeating said averaging function (1) in a series of overlapping time intervals a predetermined number of times, (3) identifying the maximum average achieved over any of said time intervals and (4) outputting a derived value representing said maximum average.
1 Assignment
0 Petitions
Accused Products
Abstract
A vehicle monitoring device 10 consists of a damped-pendulum transducer 12 coupled to a potentiometer 14. The analog output of the potentiometer 14, following a braking test with the vehicle concerned, is sampled in a peak/trough detector 16. A microprocessor 18 comprising signal processing unit 20 and arithmetic unit 22 controls the sampling and sums, averages and displays the output of microprocessor 18 on a digital display 24. If desired, a suitably programmed small computer may be used in place of microprocessor 18. According to one aspect of the invention, the device 10 is adapted to serve as a brake-efficiency meter. In this case, the display 24 will be arranged to display the average, or currently-measured, deceleration, as the case may be. In an alternative application, the device 10 is adapted to serve as a safe-slope meter. In this case, the display 24 will be arranged to display the safe-slope limit in degrees and the device will preferably also be operable to give audio and/or visual warnings to the driver of the vehicle when the angle of the vehicle reaches some predetermined relationship with the critical descent angle.
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Citations
10 Claims
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1. A vehicle monitoring device comprising:
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an accelerometer; and processing means, responsive to said accelerometer, for;
(1) averaging out decelerating peaks and troughs occurring during a time interval of predetermined length, (2) repeating said averaging function (1) in a series of overlapping time intervals a predetermined number of times, (3) identifying the maximum average achieved over any of said time intervals and (4) outputting a derived value representing said maximum average. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)
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Specification