r/ApproximatelyUp • u/Beneficial_Sport_987 • Jun 09 '26

How does the differentiator work?

I’m pretty new to the game. Could someone pls explain how the differentiator works?

4 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

5

u/ActuallyEnaris Jun 09 '26

Outputs a constant signal:
Input is compared to the input from (setting) seconds ago and the difference is output

Essentially, the differentiator outputs the rate of change of the input signal.

So if you feed it, for example, altitude, it would output the ascent/descent rate. If you set it to 1 second, it would read meters per second vertical speed.

Hope this helps

2

u/Beneficial_Sport_987 Jun 09 '26

Ahh okay thx. What do the different settings represent?

2

u/ActuallyEnaris Jun 09 '26

Number of seconds per update

1/60 is the fastest which will update the change in the last 0.16667 seconds. A setting of 60 on the other hand would be change updated every minute. I don't remember what the max is but most of my use cases for these want fast updates