MEMs Gyroscope Rabbit Hole

I wandered a bit down a rabbit hole this morning when I was innocently enough thinking about teaching trig to kids using a smartphone for building height measurement.

Turns out there's all sorts of information about phones that can tell what angle they're at using a gyrscope. It also turns out that my phone, a Samsung S23+ uses an STMicroElectronics MEMs gyroscope. Anyway, here are the cool resources:

STMicro gyroscopes page has a very nice chapterized video on how all this works. I could not find the same videos on YouTube. If you're looking for the physics reasoning behind the devices, this is the page.

Here's the Mozilla API for accessing this kind of thing in your phone via JavaScript.

Here's the Google specific API.

Here's the STMicro intro video to MEMs from YouTube

Expect to see more soon.

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