Status: Published!
Read the paper here: An International Study of Foucault's Pendulum
Starting in Spring 2019, I began designing an experiment based on Foucault's Pendulum. Taking advantage of my contacts in my former university in Argentina, UTN, I designed a setup that measures the opposite directions of precession of a Foucault Pendulum.
To reliably measure a pendulum's inertial plane, I designed a new device that aligns with a pendulum's inertial plane and can be rotated along with the precession. Initially using slits on vertical bars as a visual plane, and then being changed to a laser auto-level, the device can measure a plane's precession with a resolution of +/- 1°.
In this video, you can see a demonstration of how the pendulum aligns with the Planar Precession Compass, which lights the pendulum's suspension line bright red at the peak height of its swing.