Thought I'd just post up about a little project I started on Wednesday. I ordered an Baby Orangutan (AVR Atmega 168) and an 18G accelerometer not long before RoboWars 5. I finally managed to dig it out last week and start playing with it on my breadboard.

Anyway, I decided to tinker and started on the path of making a G-Meter, so I knocked it up on the breadboard and started playing.

Two videos here of G-Meter v1.0 - just a few LED's showing roughly some G force scale.
http://crystalnode.net/videos/gmeter1.mp4
http://crystalnode.net/videos/gmeter2.mp4

A video of v2.0, now with funky LCD screen
http://crystalnode.net/videos/gmeter3.mp4

Still needs some more work to get it calibrated and to stop the glitches, but I'm happy with it. Almost gave up on it tonight when the LCD screen wouldn't show any text, after two hours, I found a forum post on Sparkfun suggesting to tie the Rs pin to ground, and it worked.....

Once I tweak it enough, I'll look at buying another accelerometer in the 3-5G range and made up a proper unit to mount into my Silvia Wank factor some would say, but I reckon it's more Geek factor
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https://www.halfdonethings.com/

good to see you doing some experiemental work there.

My Car-Bus communications project is starting to take shape amogst the blizzard of specs, datasheets, capacititve driveloading callculations, protocols, etc etc. I've been wading through for the last couple of months.

When its at prototype stage, I'm thinking it might be of interest to quite a few of your guys who like to tinker with this sort of thing. Linux PC powered Car GUI dashboard with a simple Cat5 bus out to as many sensors/actuators as you care to fill you car with.. 1 wire to rule them all

I reckon a G-Meter fired strobe light on a bot would be cool. Hit it a bit, no result. hit it hard and "Boom!" brilliant flash. almost as good as sparks !

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Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people

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I reckon a G-Meter fired strobe light on a bot would be cool. Hit it a bit, no result. hit it hard and "Boom!" brilliant flash. almost as good as sparks !

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