Babar Latif wrote:
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Initially I myself had thought of doing it with tables, but I said to myself that perhaps its not the designers approach.

Babar,

I think most people would approach the problem thinking about the equations and thats a good thing as you must be able to master the situation before you can measure it.

As engineers we sometimes get drawn into our own calculations. We plan our design from the front of the process to the end. The thing I look for when considering whether a project is taking on a table approach solution is whether the output display can match the level of calculation accuracy and resolution of which we are capable. Its good when working through the process of a solution to make sure your solutions match the output end of the process.

In this design, a speedometer output is usually sparse and it need not be updated often because the bicycle rider mostly watches the road. It was nice to reveal that we could compute nice answers with an 8051, but we'd have no reasonable way to display them to the rider without burdening him. I had a bicycle speedometer that updated too often and many times I couldn't read it because it was fluttering between display values... its design was a greater handicap.

If this were an instrumentation speedometer used for RPM measurements on reciprocating machinery... then the user may well require that computational approach.

-aka Jay C. Box