A student came to me asking to borrow a ruler, so I gave him one of our 0.5M wooden rulers, he looked at it and then said I dont know how to use thios can I have the electronic ruler. So I gave him a set of calipers 15cm with a LCD display and he went away happy.
So I tried to find a larger/longer version must be digital with a display, couldn't find anything above 30cm.
So wonderign if any exist as this could make an interesting project in the futre making a 1 metre version.
Maybe interesting but hardly necessary. Even a cheap laser measure device should be good for ±2mm for up to 50m.
Amazon:
There are plenty of digital tape measures.
Plenty of those buyable now.
"I don't know how to use this" ??? WTF?
You can use your phone to do stuff like this now. That's one 'tool' that kids really do seem to understand[1].
[1] My phone uses Lidar to measure stuff, but ICBA to bother with it.
Why not teach him how to use the wooden ruler - a new addition to his skill set, attractive to employers!
How do these telephone measures work? Brian
They are available but are (to my mind anyway) far too expensive . The examples given 'else thread' seem to be just under £400 to £2000.
Learning establishments may not fret over spending two grand on an item but would YOU be happy handing over a two grand bit of kit to a student?
WTF needs 100th of a millimetre precision (I was going to put accuracy there but relatively cheap ones may only be accurate to a tenth of a milimetre) over a metre?
Better to teach/show the students how to use wooden rulers (a trivial but necessary skill).
There's a 500mm version on AliExpress for £57 which doesn't seem too bad?
They take a video of the thing you are measuring going past the lens.
They can estimate how far the camera is from the target by comparing movement in the centre of the image with movement at the edge.
Given that they can work out how far the centre of the image has moved.
Andy
Plus a 1000mm for £157
Not very well for small distancies from what I've heard.
I assukme triangllation methods from the dual lenses of digital camera or lidar
cheers but they don;t like us or ordering from aliexpress but the prices are OK.
the only one I found was a 600mm from farnell, at £1, 100
I'd have thought they'd know that from school having A-levels in physics maths etc. But don;t forget that these studetn sare from the covid years so don;t have much experience doing anything that can't be domne on a keyboard and on-line.
Don't think you need any skills at management levels
I had a need for such a thing (measuring the distance between lots of awkward joists: 400mm +/- lots), and bought a £4 set of 150mm digital calipers and made a 350mm stick to nail on the end. Plans changed and I didn't need it for that job - but a new plan is a digital angle measure (Trend 500mm, about £25) and some trig.
Theo
I must have misunderstood ... please tell me that you aren't saying that a secondary school kid in the UK doesn't know how to use a ruler ... ... snipped
Their students are mostly foreign students.
Well 2nd year university student designing a search and rescue robot. I think he wanted to measure the diameter of the axels for ordering wheels and which axel or motor & wheel would fit. I have a stock of axels which they can have which are 3.2mm, 2.8mm or 1.8mm in diameter. But I'll also order anything within reason they request. So I can understand why he might not be able to use a 1/2m wooden ruler which is only divided into mm scale.
My main point is that they don't always know what they need or want or how to corectly describe somethiing. I'd like to think we are here to education the students, but it seems we now spend longer making sure we have the 'correct' balance of Female, BAME and LTGBQ+ ratios than we spend on educating.
The same student used our plastic calipers (supplied free by Anglia electronic components) for measuring something else as the digital ones were in use by another student. He measured something and it was 12mm then he tried the 'digital' ones and it measured 11.3mm . he asked me which was the correct, I just said think about it.
We do have a set of micrometers
You're foreign, so yes that can explain it.
I despair, so these are engineering under-grads(!!!) who don't know something as fundamental as how to measure objects? Teach them to wrap a piece of paper round the axle, mark the overlap point, unroll and measure the distance between the marks, then multiply it by 7 and divide by 22. If my aged (engineering grad) brain is working correctly your diameters should give circumferences of around 10, 8.5 and 6 ... easily differentiated (and I don't mean calculus).
Mention of the C word makes me wonder whether modern engineering studes would understand how to evaluate triple integrals in spherical coordinates - I did once, have never used it, and wouldn't know where to begin now :-(
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