Summer Project: Step 2

Hello again! I just finished protoyping the accelerometer hook-up! In layman's terms, I connected wires in a non-permanent manner in order to link the accelerometer (for those who don't remember, it measures acceleration) to the computer. Check it out!

I had to appropriate a couple new pieces of gear to do this! Firstly, my roommate's safety glasses (thank you Andrew!) and a pair of wire strippers. I didn't think I'd be soldering this early on, but my colourful jumper cables just didn't fill the holes on the accelerometer. I cut and stripped some red wire, which is what you see coming out of the little red (might not be red, I am colourblind) rectangle on the right side of the breadboard (the thing with all the holes). If you look really closely at that red rectangle, you'll see a tiny black bit. That 2mm by 4mm chip is actually the accelerometer. I've wired it up to the Arduino via the I2C protocol (SPI didn't quite work), and read data! Look at this data!

That's the static acceleration of the accelerometer. Basically it's the force of gravity acting on it in 3 dimensions.

Now for the next step! I need to stabilize and plot the data readings. This means that I need to make the numbers look more normal. I need to make the accelerometer sit flat instead of hovering in the air at an oblique angle. Then I need to record data as I wave the accelerometer around, and put that data on a graph. This will show me that I can get reliable and understandable data from this thing. That should take a couple days, and the step after that is a lot more exciting, don't worry!

Now here's a couple sweet tracks I've been listening to! Check out Sunlight by Starkey and Sunlight by the Bag Raiders. Why sunlight? I don't know, I think I slept through the sunny part of today.