Recommendation for tilt sensor

You might look at Analog Devices range of accelerometers. As Einstein pointed out, you can't distinguish between gravity and acceleration, and an suitable accelerometer can fiunction as a tilt meter.

Historically, the job used to be done with a blob of mercury in a sealed tube; if the blob moved far enough a pair of contacts would connect through the mercury. Someone may have reworked this with optical fork to detect when the mercury blob moves far enough.

points out that Nitendo uses tilt sensors in its Game Boy hand-held games systems, so somebody must be making them cheap and in volume.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

You could use an accelerometer, combined with a microcontroller and a relais. Nowadays accelerometers are really inexpensive:

Problem could be to hand solder 3mm x 3mm (for the Freescale sensor) or even 2mm x 2mm (for the Bosch sensor), but there are other sensors in bigger chip packages. Part costs would be less than 10 dollar for the whole circuit.

The traditional approach would be mercury or tilt switch like this one:

But you can't detect small angle tilts with it and I don't think that it detects shocks, if someone kicks the vending machine.

Think pinball machine. Tilt switch was a bus-bar "pendulum" hanging into the center of a wire circle. ...Jim Thompson

There's gotta be an interesting back story to this????? Why would one want to know and what could one do about it? Automatically re-level the machine? Set off an explosion to neutralize a vandal?

Microswitch and rod poked thru the bottom sitting on the ground?

Yeah and what about when you pay the money and the screw thingy does its thing and your bag of chips are dangling on the edge? You telling you DON'T shake it a little?

G=B2

Yeah but these days they make that little 3D accelerometer that goes into all sorts of toys and laptops, and cameras get 2D ones.

I used to service pinball machines, two foot high by 20' long ladder diagrams, ugh. Fun playing one with the glass top open.

Grant.

Well some one has to pay for the last guy that tilted the machine to get two or more for the price of one!

In some circumstances a simple tilt sensor can be made by having a small LDR (Light dependent resistor, or CdS cell), pointed downwards in a tube on the floor. Normally it would be in the dark, so to speak. But when the equipment is tilted some light gets to it. These thing have a huge decrease in resistance even with low light levels. Think this is also used a booby trap in placed explosives, against tampering. You lift it, -boom-. Of course it requires there to be 'some' light in the place. But solid state, no oxidized contacts, easy to interface.

I have 50 of the ball type mechanical tilt switches. You are welcome to them. Email rike2 @ bellsouth dot net.

Back when i played pinball, i'd gunch it quite a bit.