AcceloPrint: Fabricating Customizable Accelerometers with Multi-Material 3D Printing

Abstract

We introduce AcceloPrint, 3D-printed acceleration sensors that can be fabricated in one pass alongside a 3D object and report on its angular orientation or acceleration. AcceloPrint utilizes capacitive sensing to track the deflection of a 3D printed cantilever beam to a sensor patch. Our AcceloPrint tool integrated into a 3D editor generates a sensor with a user-defined sensing range generated by our computational model. We also propose a novel sensor design with an adjustable sensing range post-fabrication. Our technical evaluation shows our sensor can detect acceleration up to 50 m/s2, with a root mean squared error of 0.35 m/s2 (%3.57) in the range up to 10 m/s2. We demonstrate AcceloPrint with three application examples on sports performance tracking and tangible tools.