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Multi-Sensitivity Acceleration Sensor

Mindsensors released a new version of the acceleration sensor.

"Multi-Sensitivity Acceleration Sensor (ACCL-Nx-v2) is a 3 axis digital acceleration sensor designed for LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT. This sensor works at 4 different sensitivity levels of gravitiy.
The sensitivity can be chosen in your program. This sensor can be used to measure static and dynamic acceleration in different axes. You can use this on your robot as tilt sensor or to track the velocity profile."

More information can be found here.

Comments

Nate KI6STK said…
How do you track velocity with it? I understand speed, but where does it get its direction from?
Feb 2, 2008, 1:35:00 AM
Brian Davis said…
The sensor measure acceleration, not speed or velocity. By keeping track of the accelerations in all three directions, you can estimate the velocity, but it's just an estimate (and a difficult one to make accurately at that).

I've yet to have a reason to go beyond the 2.5 G level, but I could see a few very interesting uses for this. For one thing, there are amusement park rides that do exceed those limits (some reach 5 G's, and shock loads can be still greater for very brief periods). Also measuring accelerations on free-falling (& impacting) payloads for instance - although at some point, you have to ask why bother with a sensor that can measure 10 G's if I'm unwilling to risk the NXT at those levels :)

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Brian Davis
Feb 2, 2008, 4:00:00 AM
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