Ever wonder how to measure a vehicle’s performance using an accelerometer in a high level programming language? Well, Mike Harkabus has just put together a nice tutorial (with source) on Microsoft’s Coding4Fun Blog that explains how to do so. Called iAccelerate, “using basic physics equations, we can derive a vehicle’s current speed, distance traveled, horsepower, and other performance metrics from the acceleration of the vehicle”, all of which is written in Visual C# Express.

Since the Express languages are free, you can put this entire project together all for the price of the accelerometer (given that you have a vehicle to test and a laptop of course). The accelerometer used in this this tutorial is the Phidget 2-axis accelerometer, which happens to be under $70.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 19th, 2007 at 2:58 pm and is filed under Hack / DIY Stuff, Project Ideas, Software, Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.