I just love wii, because its so cheap.
So here is the case i am working on at the moment:
I am having an rc sailboat, where the sail is replaced by an electrical motor with a propeller to simulate the sail force.
Then I have a servo for the rudder and a servo for canting keel. This means if the sailboat tilts to one side I can move the keel opposite to make it compensate for the tilting force.
So my goal is to make it stay level and at given course, by waypoints.
So I guess i need to meassure the angle. Does it matter where I meassure the angle, is inside the hull, close to CG, deck or at the mast top? Could i use the WiiMotion+, 15usd at dealextreme for a 3 axis gyro? Then in addition I need accelerometer to compensate for the drift of the gyros or? Could I then use nunchuck(10usd, just to get a cheap accelerometer, maybe better getting one from sparkfun?) and rip off the plastic to make it smaller. Then I need GPS for course and a method to transfer data from a great distance back to a server to evaluate data, plot position, send commands, video feed etc. The best option I see here is to use a cell phone with GPS, UTMS and video camera. I could then write a small Java applet that communicates with the server and the usb/bluetooth port on the cell phone. So i thought maybe a Teensy could do this, or is this wrong? I was thinking about using the Nokia Express music cell phone.
The wiring will be a minimum and the total system would be cheap.
Any comments where to start? I have googled a lot, but cant find out much on the cell phone -teensy connection bit.
There is a code for reading the wi+, with kalman filtering, but this seems to somehow still be under developement.
Use this board to communicate with the motor driver board and a nokia cellphone with GPS and gprs,wifi,bluetooth(150usd)
This way i think it is posible to create a cheap imu/robot which can send data from almost everywhere. Any thoughts around this?