Wiimote Used To Measure Car’s Acceleration And G-Forces
By Andrew Liszewski
Someone with the alias of ‘Klee’ has posted a brief guide on the VWvortex Forums of how to use the Wiimote’s built in 3-axis accelerometers to measure g-forces and calculate the 0-60 performance of your car.
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 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).
Besides the Wiimote itself, all you need is a copy of Glovepie v0.29 (or higher) and a bluetooth dongle with the BlueSoleil human interface drivers. Klee has also provided the Excel spreadsheet document he created, complete with formulas and graphs for crunching and interpreting the numbers.
[ VWvortex Forums - Wii Remote Measurements ] VIA [ MAKE: Blog ]
Related Tags: automotive, DIY, Gaming
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