So what did I find? These guys! http://shoppingcart.analog.com/ShoppingCartWeb/Samples.aspx?locale=en#
They seem to give free accelerometer samples, perfect for what my project consists of!
Except that I’m unable to register because they wont send me the e-mail verification and the e-mail I sent them about it has gone unresponded to. I suspect that this is related to the weekend.
Onward! The accelerometer I have in mind from that site is the ADXL345. Turns out that there’s a bunch of documentation on that! Here is something that’ll help me get it up and running: http://codeyoung.blogspot.com/2009/11/adxl345-accelerometer-breakout-board.html skimming through that page (watching the video) largely indicates to me that it’ll tell me how to get the accelerometer to measure tilt. This is fine. But, what I really need to know is acceleration in the X, Y, and Z axes. This page (http://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/240 along with the actual product info page from analog.com) tells me that is measures Gs, which are units of acceleration. Acceleration is a vector quantity, which means it’s directional. So yay, what I hope to achieve is within reach!
However, if i want my project to be completely independent of the outside world in terms of resources, and still be able to tell me things, it has to be able to store the data it gets. Or stream it. But I’m going to assume that streaming is harder than storing because I already know a teeny tiny bit of writing files in C. So what do I need? Storage! How do I do it? This guy! http://www.chipstobits.com/blog/storage-shield/ if I feel like buying more things. Which I may. Now that I have income. Awesome, all I need! Except a power supply. Which requires more reading and it’s like 2:00 am so that wont happen.
Yet.
