A similar type of project using IBM Lenovo hardware and OpenBSD 
http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20060803130207


Snip from article

Chris Kuethe has written an application which, by taking advantage of some
unique OpenBSD features, has allowed him to turn his laptop into a race car
data logger.

aps(4) is a driver that utilizes the OpenBSD sensors framework to retrieve
and report various statistics provided by IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads. The
important ones here were the X and Y acceleration features, which provide
the same functionality found in expensive accelerometer devices.

Since a typical consumer GPS will only update its data once per second, and
a race car might be travelling in excess of 200 km/h, on its own, it is not
capable of generating much meaningful performance data. It is even less fit
to record information about turns and other sudden changes in position.
Digital signal processing and sound editing fans might recognize a parallel
problem: sampling frequencies too low to properly describe a signal
(Nyquist/Shannon Sampling Theorem, anyone?). Since GPS receivers that can
provide navigation solutions several times tend to be slightly expensive and
less common than those that produce only one solution per second, and 'real'
dataloggers are even more expensive, it occurred to Chris that he already
had all the necessary hardware, as well as a framework for putting it to use
for his task.


-----Original Message-----
From: tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org
[mailto:tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org] On Behalf Of Jeremy
Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2008 9:42 AM
To: tclug-list at mn-linux.org
Subject: [tclug-list] Mobile computing


I thought this was interesting:  Man puts iPhone in model rocket.  Uses 
accelerometers and GPS to track.  

Unfortunately, the iPhone can't log data beyond 3G (pun intended).

  http://www.mobileorchard.com/the-iphone-rocket/

Years ago, I worked on inertial accelerometers for aviation, and I can say 
that this appears slightly lower quality...  But what's interesting is that 
many people will now be carrying iPhones and Androids, both of which allow 
for easy deployment of software.  This is the first time that normal people 
have carried 'general purpose' computers with internet access.  

All sorts of wacky stuff is possible.

Has anyone made apps for Android (linux, java) yet?

J

_______________________________________________
TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
tclug-list at mn-linux.org
http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list