collecting & visualizing sensor data - best approach?
Several possibilities; Both at little cost, but since you have an accelerometer, I know your budget is not 0.

1) use a shield with an SD card on the arduino to log the information to a file on the SD card.  Open it later from a laptop or PC.  Hopefully it will have enough room to store data that you can ignore later for pre-flight, post-flight time.  If not, simply add some fixed delay to the start of your program (loop 5 times; wait 1 minute;)

2) some form of remote, like an XBee, or even a wireless WiFi Shield. The setup can be complicated but that would be ideal for real time visualization on a laptop at the flying site.

3) probably the easiest/least expensive - a cheap bluetooth transmitter.



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This method would allow a bluetooth mobile to collect and visualize the data. This device connects to the serial lines on an arduino, (pin 0&amp;1) and standard Serial.Write() function can be used.  Any terminal program for your mobile will be able to receive the data. You could also get fancy and write your own if you want to visualize it. You may be able to find something already existing, like this



In cases 2 &amp; 3 you will need a way to xmit the data. I use MQTT. A protocol just for this, but it is TCP only. I also use it with JSON (eg Json for Arduino to manage the data.  You will need to find the same. Look at MQTT-SN as a possibility, or you can just write your own serialization protocol based around JSON without too much difficulty.