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

Related Posts:

Build a accelerometer in 1 minute!

Tags: accelerometer, Auto, Circuits, Consumer, Cool, DoItYourself!, Educational, Entertainment, g-meter, Gadgets, Hack, Industrial, Projects, vwvortex, wii-diy, wii-hack, wiimote

This entry was posted by max on Sunday, October 7th, 2007 at 9:33 pm and is filed under Auto, Circuits, Consumer, Cool, DoItYourself!, Educational, Entertainment, Gadgets, Hack, Industrial, Projects.