I am an evolutionary biologist, looking for help writing a program for a DOS based computer for measuring running speed of insects. The basic design is described below.
A light plastic ball is suspended on air, with two mouse clickers touching its sides (half-way up the ball, 90 degrees from each other). An insect is placed on top of the ball, secured in place by a metal arm. It can move its legs, but cannot move in space. If it runs on top of the ball, the ball will turn (as it's suspended on air), which in turn moves the clickers. The clickers are attached to the computer, which measures both speed of the ball turning and the direction in which it turns.
This set up was built about 1.5 decades ago, and has not been used since. I am trying to re-set up the apparatus and am running into issues getting the program to do do what I need. My hope is to find someone who can write a new program for me, which will run in DOS and with the old hardware, which will measure relative speed of the turning ball (I don't care about the direction of turning).
## Deliverables
Details of what I need and more full description of the apparatus is in the attached zip file.