On Tue, 06 Jan 2004 10:34:51 GMT, "Vic Fraenckel"
wrote:

I suspect that you are looking for a ready-made solution for measuring
pitch/roll. Perhaps something exists out there but I suspect that the price
would be high.

Yeah, basically (unless really necessary), I'm looking for something
ready-made. I need 2 units & they need to get installed on 2 ocean going
ships for about 2 or 3 months for some testing of satellite transceiver
performance vs sea state, so it's important that it works properly - I won't
be able to go & make service calls! :-) It will need to be reliable as well
as accurate to a degree or so over the expected pitch/roll range of the
vessel.

There is a solid state sensor that is a two axis accelerometer made by
Analog Devices. It is the ADXL202 chip

Coincidentally I have one sitting on my desk at the moment - one of those
projects that got started but not finished. I was looking at using these
accelerometers to strap to engine blocks on boats to determine whether the
particular engine was running or not - we had a client that wanted monitoring
of engine hours for 4 diesel propulsion engines & 2 diesel generators on a
boat. I thought that I might be able to strap these units onto the engine
blocks of each engine & get at least an on/off indication, and maybe as a
bonus an RPM count. I hadn't considered using them as pitch/roll sensors
before. Calibration would be the hard part.

I've seen some good rate sensors at
http://www.atasensors.com/Sensors2/index.htm
and have toyed with somehow getting pitch & roll from these, but don't
actually know how to do that yet - integration or something similar I guess?
The sensors themselves have good characteristics - fast response, etc. It
would definitely be nice to find something that provided pitch & roll in
RS232 format without any work on my part. :-)

Dave