3 Replies Latest reply: Oct 24, 2013 4:00 AM by Tomas Vaverka RSS

Accelerometer as tilt sensor

Pavan Kinariwala Level 1

Hello. I was about to develop tilt sensor using Acclerometer.Could someone please explain me how the value of low medium and high value of G affect the tilt sensing.

  • Re: Accelerometer as tilt sensor
    Jose Alberto Reyes Morales Employee

    Hi Pavan,


    Accelerometers are sensitive to the difference between the linear acceleration of the sensor and the local gravitational field. The data sheet for any accelerometer will denote the positive x, y, and z axes on the sensor package and, by convention, these are defined so that a linear acceleration aligned in the direction of these axes will give a positive accelerometer output.

    A gravitational field component aligned along the same axes directions will, however, result in a negative reading on the accelerometer.


    Using an accelerometer, you can calculate the angle between the gravitational vector measured by the accelerometer and the initial orientation with the gravitational field pointing downwards along the z-axis.


    You can find excellent documentation explaining how to measure the tilt angle using accelerometers in the application note AN3461 that you can find in the following link: http://cache.freescale.com/files/sensors/doc/app_note/AN3461.pdf


    Best regards,


  • Re: Accelerometer as tilt sensor
    Pavan Kinariwala Level 1

    Thanks for the response. But than what does 1g, 2g, 200g, +\-2g and other values tell us.

    • Re: Accelerometer as tilt sensor
      Tomas Vaverka Employee



      Inclination sensing is a static measurement that uses the gravity vector and its projection on the axes of the accelerometer to determine the tilt angle. Therefore, to achieve the highest resolution of a tilt measurement, low-g/high-sensitivity accelerometers are required.


      For example, the output of our 14-bit accelerometer operating in the ±2g range will change by 8192 counts as the accelerometer is rotated 180° from pointing downward to upward, giving an average sensitivity of one count per 0.022° change in tilt.


      I hope this answers your question.