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Originally Posted by mschulkind
It should be noted that there are no gyros in the kit. What you think is a gyro is really an accelerometer. The accelerometer will never feasibly measure how much you have turned. It is great as a tilt sensor or something similar, but without knowing your center of rotation and the mass rotating around that center, you will never get a reasonable readout of how much you have turned. The accelerometer in the orientation you are thinking of reads the centripetal acceleration, not radial acceleration.
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I stand corrected. He is right. My science fair project involved true radial accelerometers. My mind is on those.
Let me elaborate a bit on what mschulkind is saying about measuring tilt. Most accelerometers can measure static acceleration (gravity). If you tilt the accelerometer it will no longer be entirely be in the axis of gravity and its reading will decrease. Basically you mount an accelerometer so that it is aligned with the vertical axis, it's output will be porportional to cos X where X is the angle away from vertical that the accelerometer is pointed.