Wii DIY HACK – Using your Wiimote to measure your car’s acceleration!

by max on Sunday, October 7th, 2007

Wiimote Jetta

Although this is an awesome Wii hack using GlovePie and the Wiimote, you could probably do this a lot easier using a simple 3-axis accelerometer and a microcontroller.

I got this idea after seeing some physics class use the wiimote in some kinda pendulum experiment.

Why not use the wiimote’s built in 3-axis accelerometers to measue g-forces, acceleration and even calculate my own 0-60mph times!

So I did. I wrote a script to dump all the g-force readings from the wiimote to a comma separated value file, then did some post processing in MS Excel, and voila, I can see every bump, every curve, my acceleration and braking, and even calculated my current speed using high school physics (v=a*t)

I even convinced my coworker to take me out in his E46 M3 to measure his SMG’s performance

I admit, it’s not super accurate since the wiimote spits out G readings rounded to two decimal places. It also provides other acceleration readings in finer granularity, but I couldn’t figure out what metric it was recording in. I used Gs since I knew it was just the acceleration of gravity (9.8 m/s/s)

[via] vwvortex

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Build a accelerometer in 1 minute!

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  • Carl Linford
    I am after a g-meter nice a basic, digital read out x,y. For use in a car as a modification to a permanant fixture to the dash
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