: Has anyone thought about the idea of a hat-mounted compass with a
: "heads-up" display on the visor?. What about chip-based
: technology rather than the traditional floating magnet compass? The
: mounting position would, for most of us, eliminate the possibility of
: being too close to large metallic objects in the kayak. I'll bet that I
: can put my hat on plus or minus less degrees than the accuracy with which

Having put some effort into researching a some of the more or less off the shelf solutions to electronic compasses for a small submersible ROV, here are the problems.

Cost and tilt.

Many of the same reasons a conventional compass needs to be level to be accurate apply to electronic compasses. Honeywell do a real nice OEM module that is EXTREMELY accurate, that has a three axis magnetic sensing to compensate for tilt. It is also pretty costly, and still needs an external microcontroller and display to make it useful. It would probably fly in the Cap-compass but costs too much.
Dinsdale Instruments do a sensor with adequate (for this job) accuracy for only about $25 usd, which needs slightly more in the way of support electronics, but not much. Its big bug-bear is tilt-about 5 degrees max if I remember rightly before it locks up like an un-gimballed magnetic compass would.
How still do you think you can hold your head fella ?
But why stop at the heads up compass-put the GPS in there too!

Pete-my day job is an embedded software engineer-Croft