[JHBurch]

Quentin,

You are correct that the gyro is very sensitive to noise. When using the gyro last year the Technokats used both mechanical and software filtering. We mounted the gyro on a foam pad that reduced some of the noise, and also used a simple filtering algorithm in the code. Details for both of these are provided in the white paper listed above. Obviously the sensitivity is only in the direction (or plane) you're measuring.

If you're concerned about responses to impacts, I suspect it will max out (i.e. read 0 or 255) with even a fairly slight bump. This can be a good thing since it's not too hard to filter out spikes. If I remember right the gyro maxes out at an angle rate that's equivelant to about 1 robot revolution in 5 seconds, so if you're trying to use it to track your robot's heading you better not turn too fast. :-)