I had a thought yesterday at work and did some digging. I was thinking that it would be cool to install an accelerometer in your plane and then plot the data to see what kind of forces we actually put our planes through. Then I got to thinking more and came up with the idea that if you use a 3-axis accelerometer and you know your sample rate you could 3-d plot your flight path. If you took it even farther and put one in each side of the wing and in the tail, you would have an even more interesting plot, especially for the guys that fly 3d and pattern stuff.

So I got to looking and found a product that is available that is made by Eagle Tree. It looks pretty cool, but all I am really interested in is the accelerometer. Granted, it has other cool features and lets you plot your flight through GPS, but GPS is only so accurate. Also, the accelerometer that it has is an attachment to the main unit, which is not what I wanted. I was looking for something small (small enough for 1/2a planes) that could be self contained during the flight and store its own data to be offloaded later.

I looked through some IC sensor suppliers and found a couple nice options, but I was wonder what ya'll thought about this. Do you think it is practical to try and put something like this together? It would only really be for me and the guys locally who would be interested, maybe if someone here wanted to try it I would send it out.

I am going to try and keep it within a package at or less then the size of a standard servo with bare minimum weight.

Also, since I am not familiar with all aspects of our hobby, what range of g forces do I need to be looking at? How high do I need to be able to measure? 2-3g? 10g? 18g? higher? There are several sensors available but they are expensive enough that I can't just by them randomly and try them out to see if they survive.


Here is the Eagle Tree site for anyone interested. http://www.eagletreesystems.com/