A few questions on Arduino Uno? Want to record acceleration movements of a truck

Using Arduino Project Guidance
1

Hello everyone!

I would like to use an Arduino Uno in order to have it record accelerometer data that will be placed inside the back of a semi-trailer from a truck. This info will be used for my group's mechanical engineering senior design project. If anyone could please help me with the following questions and/or post resources in which I can learn and study from, that will GREATLY be appreciated!

So here are my questions regarding this project:

  1. Will an accelerometer such as this one suffice?

And where can I best learn on how to read and record data from it, for hours on end?

  1. How can I learn to save the data? I heard that I need to use an SD card shield such as this one:

How can have the arduino read the live data from the accelerometer, and save it in a text file, or CSV and such?

  1. Will a USB power bank such as

http://www.amazon.com/iXCC-8000mAh-Power-Bank-Smartphones/dp/B017JL7DI4/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1453515651&sr=8-3&keywords=usb+power+bank
be enough to supply the arduino power for hours? And if so, how many?

Thank you all very much for your help and support!

2

  1. Yes, the accelerometer you've shown should be good.

  2. The whole circuit, if you aren't operating some backlit display, probably will draw less than 100 ma., so an 8000 maH battery would last, in an ideal world, 8000/100 = 80 hours. Not expecting a perfect world, I would certainly expect you could run two days or more.

  3. The communication path listed from the accelerometer is I2C, which almost all arduino products support. The code needed for that communication is already encapsulated in a library, so setting up communication is minor.

  4. Finally, the Arduinos mostly have limited onboard EEPROM and data memory, so you should count on adding an SD card to the system. The nice thing about that is you can store your data in some standard file format, so that the card should be easy to pull out and download to a computer.

3

jrdoner:

  1. Yes, the accelerometer you've shown should be good.

  2. The whole circuit, if you aren't operating some backlit display, probably will draw less than 100 ma., so an 8000 maH battery would last, in an ideal world, 8000/100 = 80 hours. Not expecting a perfect world, I would certainly expect you could run two days or more.

  3. The communication path listed from the accelerometer is I2C, which almost all arduino products support. The code needed for that communication is already encapsulated in a library, so setting up communication is minor.

  4. Finally, the Arduinos mostly have limited onboard EEPROM and data memory, so you should count on adding an SD card to the system. The nice thing about that is you can store your data in some standard file format, so that the card should be easy to pull out and download to a computer.

Thank you very much for your reply!
If I may ask another question, what would be the best way I could learn to code the arduino so that it reads the accelerometer data live, and stores it into the SD card? As I currently have no idea, since I am still new to the Arduino platform.