KXPS5 accelerometer, now and than..

I've been looking for a right accelerometer for more than a year. I did have this idea that it would be great to stack up these little guys against the gravi-force of our bubble and see the digits measuring the 3 dimensional tilt flicker on a screen. I went trough a number of choices. The venerable ADXL330 from Analogue Devices. Good, but..a bit pricey and requires 3 analogue to digital input, if having more than 3 connected might ran out of AIN inputs.Than of course STMicroelectronics LIS3LV02DQ this one pumps data trough SPI. I like, but.. still pricey.
Than there is Freescale Semiconductor MMA7455L good one, digital SPI or I2C all bells and whistles in order, and this one would've been my chose providing it only costs around 5 dollars on digikey but wait.. crawling over ebay, totally spaced out as usual, i came across this. Behold KXPS5 series accelerometers by Kionix. And wait there's more, there's a savior out there helping people to get acquainted with this technology at a very reasonable price his ebay tag is crodnet and the page on the web crodnet.co.uk.. unfortunately at the time of writing the page seems to be inaccessible, but i hope it should be an easy fix. So there.. the package of the unit is not friendly, it is LGA14 and 0.8 mm thin.. some fear and ran when see. But, wait.. it is not that bad.. have a look at the pictures.. all done by somewhat steady hand.


Using low melt, non clean solder and very fine tip of a ESD safe soldering iron at a controlled temperature point. (I personally use AOYUE 937).. but wait, there's more you can even mount it on a PCB..


again, all hand made using presensitized boards and a scaled down transparency. Than you put some solder, flux and than you bake.. more about it next blog entry.