MMA2260 Accelerometer Demo

This little board demonstrates the capabilities of the MMA2260 +/- 1.5g X-Axis Micromachined Accelerometer. As you tip it back and forth, LEDs light up to show the magnitude and direction of the G force.

The MMA2260 is the fat SOIC 16 in the upper left, isolated so it could be cut off of the board and used as a breakout, keeping only a pin header and the recommended decoupling and output RC filter.

The microcontroller is a PIC16F628, which is entirely unsuited to this application, having no ADC. I failed to notice that, being quick to note "AN0" on PORTA and slow to note that it was for a comparator, not an ADC. However, there is a builtin programmable voltage reference which was sufficiently accurate for lighting up 8 LEDs. I'm trying to get away from PICs, as AVRs have spoiled me with their GCC support, many registers and sane memory organization. Even on this project, which is only about 30 lines of C, most of the work was fighting SDCC bugs (failure to banksel, in this case). I've discovered a perverse pleasure in soldering down ICs to counteract my packrat nature. It did force me to put an ICSP header on, however.

Hours of Amusement

You can shake it, spin in circles and try to measure centrifugal force (before you fall down), put it on the kitchen counter and detect drawers closing, hold it at an angle and walk up stairs, use it as a level... the possibilities are endless! However, the +/-1.5g range isn't suitable for a lot of hobby applications like rocket altimetry, 6-axis positioning or Wii-alike controllers. The small sensing range is too easily saturated by relatively slow movements.

Datasheet Errors

There are several errors in the datasheet that I noticed, and I didn't read it very carefully!

Those problems do not exist in the MMA1260 datasheet (the Z-axis sibling), however the MMA1260's sample connection illustration Figure 5 shows the output RC filter with 1k/.1u instead of 0.01uF as listed in the notes, Figure 6 and the matching Figure 5 in the MMA2260 datasheet.

Construction Info

You can get all the files for this project from the "downloads" links on the left. You can use any ICSP-capable PIC programmer with the HEX file included in the tippy-src.zip archive. The source is included, but it is not glamorous. After overcoming SDCC bugs, I was not eager to try to clean it up and risk running afoul of the optimizer again.

I etched the board using toner transfer from a PDF image. The red LEDs are 1206 parts from a "big bag of surface mount parts" I bought a long time ago, which I strongly recommend you never, ever do! The black stripe you see underneath the board is double-stick tape for attaching a 9V battery. If you don't use some kind of padding, the pins protruding from the PCB will scratch the paint off of the battery and short together. After this picture was taken, the 9V battery clip broke off, so I re-soldered it and used a glob of hot glue for strain relief.