Plane-truss experiment with smart instrumented bars on the ST500 digital frame

A set of smart, instrumented bars and hinged node disks that assemble into arbitrary statically determinate or indeterminate plane trusses on the ST500 digital frame. Each bar carries a strain-gauge force cell that streams the internal axial force to the Sangari software and indicates its sign and magnitude with a coloured LED directly on the member. Because the node disks are hinged, the assembly behaves as an ideal truss — letting students compare measurements against the method of joints, Ritter's method of sections and FEM solutions on the same structure.