My school has an accelerometer laying around unused. Although it may not be suited for distance tracking (due to double integration and all that kinematics jazz), I'm wondering if the accelerometer could have any real purpose in the VEX competition outside of tracking.

Detecting if your robot fell off the table and smashed into the floor (or detecting collisions in general). Other than that, not much; it's really noisy

We're attempting to use 2 accelerometers and a gyroscope to do inertial navigation. The hope is that the 2 accelerometers combined, when double-integrated, are usable and not too noisy. Plus, we will also use other sensors like bumper switches to recalibrate the inertial nav in real time.

Realistically accelerometers are too much trouble for distance tracking. The same effort used toward that can have twice the success with encoders and gyros. However, one thought we're trying to test is to use the gyro on the vertical access during our autonomous hang to see if we latched on.

@idenzer Realistically accelerometers are too much trouble for distance tracking. The same effort used toward that can have twice the success with encoders and gyros. However, one thought we're trying to test is to use the gyro on the vertical access during our autonomous hang to see if we latched on.

I know that; I just wanted to make a successful inertial navigation program because it [as far as I know] hasn't been done before with VEX sensors.

I should add that I actually tried, for quite a while, to make such a program, but was unsuccessful. After meeting with our coach who knows significantly more than me about the topic, I will try again.