Mini map display on the Dashboard

[Caleb Sykes]

I spent quite a few hours last season trying to use an accelerometer to determine position. No matter how many corrections I tried, I could not maintain a reasonable value for position for more than about 10 seconds. Any small error in acceleration measurement is compounded when you integrate to get velocity, and any small error in velocity is further compounded when you integrate to get position. All of these errors sum up very quickly. As far as I can tell, the kit accelerometer simply does not have enough precision to be used in this way (although I would really like to be proven wrong). The sample times could also be an issue if a higher-precision accelerometer were used, but I am convinced that the limiting factor when using the kit accelerometer is its precision, not the sample times.