I just finished designing a breakout board for the upcoming Invensense MPU6050. The chip has a gyroscope and a accelerometer and it’s capable of polling data from a third party magnetometer (or any other i2c device).
On the various press launches about this chip you might read that it does sensor fusion on chip.. personally, I’m still skeptical about that as the same has been told about the IMU3000 but so far nothing about that is described on the IMU3000 datasheet.
A comment on Sparkfun’s Digital IMU breakout of the IMU300, by Hypernova, perfectly describe my feelings:
Personally I was a bit disappointed with this chip when I read the datasheet compared to when it was first press released. The only thing this chip does is collect the accel data for you so you only manage one I2C, there’s no actual processing. So the Digital Motion “Processing” name is a bit deceptive as the same can be achieved with mcu’s with DMA’s. Granted it does save you some power but for the average user this won’t matter that much with home rockets lasting only a few minutes at best.
The same thing happens for the MPU6050 and MPU6000.. they are doing marketing for a orientation sensor fusion capable device but I don’t see anywhere on the current MPU6050 datasheet any information about that.. so I’m still skeptical about this. They may have very well implemented that.. personally I doubt. We will see.
UPDATE 2011-10-15: And.. I was wrong! Invensense actually developed on-chip sensor fusion hardware.. At the moment there is still very few informations on its reliability or effectivenes. There are already people using it on the Arduino.
Ok, so in the attachments below you find the KiCAD sources of this breakout board, the schematics and below some pictures of it. Most updated version available on my personal repository using bzr:
bzr co http://repository.varesano.net/LibreBB_MPU6050/
All the designs are released under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported. Enjoy!
UPDATE 2011-01-31:
Goofy23 on rcgroups.com has been so “inspired” by this that he has been so kind to have some of these PCB produced. He just received them, so below some pictures.. looking pretty great! Now, we just need the sensors to be available!
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Kicad Sources for LibreBB_MPU6050 | 72.71 KB |
| Schematics for LibreBB_MPU6050 | 54.73 KB |
| DSC00635.JPG | 4.06 MB |
| DSC00639.JPG | 4.22 MB |
