Add motion and direction sensing to your wearable FLORA project with this high precision 3-axis Accelerometer+Compass sensor. Inside are two sensors, one is a classic 3-axis accelerometer, which can tell you which direction is down towards the Earth (by measuring gravity) or how fast the board is accelerating in 3D space. The other is a magnetometer that can sense where the strongest magnetic force is coming from, generally used to detect magnetic north. By combining this data you can then orient yourself.

We based this sensor on the latest version of this popular sensor, the LSM303DLHC. The sensor has a digital (I2C) interface. Attaching it to the FLORA is simple: line up the sensor so its adjacent to the SDA/SCL pins and sew conductive thread from the 3V, SDA, SCL and GND pins. They line up perfectly so you will not have any crossed lines. You can only connect one of these sensors to your FLORA, but you can connect other I2C sensors/outputs by using the set of SCL/SDA pins on the opposite side.

Get started with the FLORA Accelerometer with our guide on the Adafruit Learning System! It uses the same Arduino library as our conventional form LSM303 breakout. The example and library code will work 'out of the box' with FLORA. Simply download our library and connect the 3V/SCL/SDA/GND pins, install the library properly and upload our test program to read out accelerometer and magnetic field data.