Schematic Symbol for Budget Robotics' Tilt sensor

basically you have a ball in the center that moves and makes contact with a pair of contacts (wire posts) on one of the sides. That's it. No fuss no mess. Not much to say for a schematic of it. To use, you would connect one contact to your MCU I/O pin, the other contact goes to ground. If you want you can hook up a 10k pullup resistor on the MCU contact side. If the ball touches the contacts on a side, the MCU will read a low or zero on that I/O pin it is hooked to. You have four sides so you would need four I/O pins dedicated to it.

Appreciate it. What I would like to know is this: when I draw a circuit schematic using the tilt sensor, is there a standard symbol to use? If not, then I will simply draw the sensor as a circle with the contact points.

J Wolfgang Goerlich

I recall seeing one of those things in a surplus store 20 or more years ago. I might even have one in a junk box somewhere. On a schematic I'd draw this as three switches in series with four wires, one from each of the four nodes. If you're also going to detect upside down (and if the thing works that way, I don't remember) then add a fourth switch between the first and fourth wire to indicate this.

That's whats amazing about it. Somebody must have made millions of those things. There used to be a toy pinball machine that used these. Although I don't think they made millions of the toy pinball machines. Talk about the ultimate parts overrun.