i’ve always wanted to slip one of these into my luggage before an airplane trip, just to see how much abuse my suitcase gets. once i bought a $300 samsonite suitcase, the next week i took my first trip with it and they’d managed to destroy two of the zippers and wrench off one wheel bracket. it was only an 800 mile trip, and i happen to know my suitcase was the only one on the plane, and it took 1.5 hours to get from the plane to baggage claim…never fly delta into atlanta (which is the same as saying “never fly delta”).

garrett –

http://www.shockwatch.com/shipping_handling_monitors/impact_indicator/index.php

Darn…beaten to post. Been working on something like this myself. The ironic thing he’s using the same housing and done a nicer job of it (I like the alpha display at the front!).

My design has a PIC18F4550 with an ADXL330 (as using in the wiiremote). Note the QFN package of the ADXL330 was soldered direct to the board….no daughter boards except for the display (an uLCD Mk1..128×128 colour unit from 4d systems).

The video below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9menwHgiyM

shows me shaking it in three dimensions and switching between the three ADXL330 channels to show the results. X is up/down, Y is left/right, Z is back/forth.
Still to do is to add 64kb flash ram (chips only, no SD), USB i/f and a LiOn charger based on the MCP73863 chip charging off USB. Hope to use a phone battery under the board instead of the AAA cells.

Phil

I don’t know if it is a particular change in the construction of rebar-reinforced concrete floor buildings, but the two sites I’ve been at lend to a rather unpleasant feeling whenever anyone walks by. The person in the cubicle next to mine is approximately twice my volume which makes that person something on the order of 340 pounds (English); this person gets up and walks around nearly every five minutes; never longer than a “rest” of fifteen minutes. It has gone far from being merely a distraction from doing my work to being a genuine pain in the… well, I reckon you can guess. I’ve recently bought a 3-axis accelerometer which I’ll hook up to something in my pile of stuff and start recording Real Soon Now. If I could get it -truly- calibrated, I think I’d take the data to the building engineer; it would be fun/useful if it was synchronized with a video camera to show who is creating the greatest bouncing. At the very least, perhaps I can move to a different cubicle (very weak grin).