Quantity   Component name
1 × Nerf Vortex football Cheap, stable-flying, and easy-to-modify. Whistles while it flies, which is cool.
1 × NodeMCU An ESP8266-based microcontroller with on-board (lossy) voltage converter and pin breakouts. The ESP8266 chip has a built-in WiFi modem and several megabytes of flash storage.
2 × MPU6050 digital accel-gyro These chips can measure up to 16 g's of acceleration in each axis. They communicate with the NodeMCU over I2C around 200 times a second. We didn't use the gyroscope data in this project, as we expected the football to spin faster than the gyro could measure.
1 × 9V battery Standard alkaline nine-volt battery. Passes lick test.
1 × DROK brand buck converter chip These little chips are great! It's a thumbnail-size switching regulator that can step down 4.5-24 volts to 0.8-17 volts at up to 3 amps without breaking a sweat! Pinout is the same as a linear regulator, sans filter capacitors.
1 × Pushbutton Used to start and stop logging, as due to time constraints we weren't able to implement throw detection.
1 × Buzzer Indicates logging start/stop