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It’s here: Dexter Industries 6-DOF IMU

Dexter Industries IMUDexter Industries have started selling their new Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) that has both a gyroscope and an accelerometer.

Gyroscope

The gyro has 3 ranges, 250, 500 and 2000 degrees per second with 1/128, 1/64 and 1/16 degree accuracy respectively.  It can measure the rate of turn on all three axes.  The gyro also has a temperature sensor that is currently not supported by my driver suite (I’ll have to work on that).  The built-in filter allows you to clean up the signal a bit before requesting it with your NXT.

Accelerometer

The other main sensor in the IMU is the 3-axes accelerometer which also sports 3 ranges, 2, 4 and 8G in both 8 and 10 bit resolutions. If speed is more important than accuracy, you can choose to use to use 8 bit resolution which requires only half the amount of data to be requested from the sensor.

Creating a balance

Matthew Richardson and Laurens Valk both made a Segway using the new Dexter Industries IMU.  Matt’s is done in NXC and Laurens’ one with ROBOTC (using my driver, w00t).  Naturally, I claim full credit for Laurens’ one.  In my defense, I was in the same room when Laurens initially programmed it.

I want one, where can I buy it?

The IMU can be purchased right here: [LINK].

About Xander

Xander Soldaat is a Software Engineer and former Infrastructure Architect. He loves building and programming robots. He recently had the opportunity to turn his robotics hobby into his profession and has started working for Robomatter, the makers of ROBOTC and Robot Virtual Words.