Oddly enough, my goals are the same. I intend to retire this spring, and buy a boat for coastal
cruising. One project I have in mind is a "wave-meter", i.e., a device which will tell me how high
the waves are....swells and wind chop. Roll and pitch should be do-able also.

My approach is the same as below. But, as pointed out in another post, calibration is the problem.

I'll follow this thread with a great deal of interest.

Norm

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

Dave,

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. If you are looking for something ready-to-go I can't help
you. If you have some electronic skills and some programming skills you can
build something that will work and most likely be way less costly than the
ready-made solutions.

There is a solid state sensor that is a two axis accelerometer made by
Analog Devices. It is the ADXL202 chip and you can find numererous
references to it with a google search on the part number. I have been
experimenting, on and off, with the device and a microprocessor for several
years and find it rather easy to interface and get working.

I am in the process of selling my home and plan to live-aboard and I have
sort of thought that a pitch/roll sensor would be a neat thing to do for a
"boat project" and I will visit this when I get set up on a boat. I would
consider a project of this type to be relatively simple to accomplish if one
had some electronic skills. All it would take is a ADXL, a simple micro and
a LCD display device and some programming to prototype a working instrument.

HTH

Vic