1. Step: Proving our hypothesis:

Our first experiments started as we got a breakout board for an SMD magnetic sensor, commonly used in robotics to orient the robot according to earth’s magnetic field.

It measures the magnetic flux density in 3 dimensions and with 8 different ranges. We moved it by hand, one time without anything metallic nearby and one time with a used jig-saw blade (steel) about 20 cm away. Using an Arduino we send the three values for the flux density for every position we examined to the console and – yes, wrote them down by hand at first ;-)

As we converted these values to a chart by using the MATLAB program, we could see a huge difference! That was the point in which we realized that our idea could possibly work.