What the heck am I going to use a tilt sensor for?

How about detecting the tilt of a plane? We fly RC gliders in our free time and someone decided that it would be really cool to see "what a right turn looks like."

The tilt sensor about to be loaded up

For your viewing pleasure:

1 - Background
2 - Foamware Setup
3 - Software Setup

Forget all this babble - show me the results!

plane1.xls - Looks like a few good turns
plane2.xls - Blah (No good)
plane3.xls - Blah
plane4.xls - Blah
plane5.xls - We snagged a lot with this one!
longflight.xls - I like we just left this one running (really big)
 

The Plan -

We wired up a tilt sensor, tested the output to make sure that the PIC could get the data and started dreaming up some applications. Of course we already had this experiment planned before we ever had the tilt sensor in our hands! We wanted to see what the tilt information looked like for a RC glider. This was the perfect test bed because the plane itself is made of styrofoam (good protection) and tape (quick modifications). The tricky part was getting that information to the eager geeks on the ground.

We considered recording the flight data to an eeprom. The problem with eeproms is that they have relatively little storage room. We would also not be sure that the data was good unless we downloaded it and viewed it. If something was wrong you would not know if until you had pulled the plane apart and wired into the eeprom. This was way too cumbersome. A breezy day for a good test flight is hard to come by - we couldn't be tweaking stuff on a whim and expect to be able to fly the next day.

The best solution is to view the data is real time with a wireless link!

On to the Foamware Setup