In this project, we will add a new component — a cool little circuit board called an accelerometer.

You've probably used an accelerometer before and haven't even realized it. Have you ever used a smart phone or an iPad and rotated the screen? What happens? Yup, the display rotates with the device. Did you ever wonder how the phone or tablet knows to rotate the display? It's done using an accelerometer very similar to the one in our kit that we're going to start using now. As you'll see, there are lots of cool applications for accelerometers when designing and building electronics.

The accelerometer included with the CREATOR Kit is in the bag marked Accelerometer Ready Set STEM Cell. Feel free to pull it out now.

By plugging in the accelerometer to the CREATOR Kit and then writing code to get information (input) from it, we can turn our hardware into a controller that can detect changes in movement (acceleration) along the three axes — left/right, front/back and up/down. Using this information, we can determine the orientation of the kit (which way it's facing) and/or the vector of the kit (which is just the speed and direction the kit is moving) at any given time.

Your Accelerometer Ready Set STEM Cell contains a single part — the accelerometer circuit board — that looks like this (from the top):

On the circuit board above, you'll see a diagram with 3 arrows, labeled X, Y and Z. Note that it looks like only two arrows, X and Y. The third arrow, the Z arrow, is somewhat hidden — it is a circle with a dot. The Z arrow is actually pointing up perpendicularly from the circuit board (imagine the arrow popping out of the screen and coming towards your face) — the dot in the middle of the circle represents the front tip of the arrow.

The accelerometer measures forces — this can be the forces it feels when you move it around, or simply the force of gravity. When the kit is sitting on a table and not moving, it reports just the force of gravity, in the X, Y, and Z directions:

Here are a couple examples:

By measuring X, Y and Z, you can essentially know the exact position of the kit at any point in time. In addition, you can use the change in these numbers to determine if the CREATOR Kit is moving in a particular direction and how fast. As you can imagine, this will allow you to do some very cool things!

And we'll start using the accelerometer in our next project...