didn’t want to sacrifice my smart phone for this experiment. Fortunately, chips containing gyroscopic sensors are relatively cheap. In reading up on gyroscopic chips, I found that orientation data from gyroscope sensors is prone to drift significantly over time, so gyroscopic sensors are frequently combined with additional sensors, such as accelerometers or magnetometers to correct for this effect. This combination of sensors is frequently referred to as an IMU, or “Inertial Measurement Unit”, and it is used in airplanes, spacecraft, GPS navigators (for use when GPS signals are unavailable) and other devices. The number of of sensor inputs in an IMU are referred to as “DOF” (Degrees of Freedom), so a chip with a 3-axis gyroscope and a 3-axis accelerometer would be a 6-DOF IMU.