IMU Measurements

Just got the components from Sparkfun now, and started experimenting, initially with the Arduino and the IMU. I was impressed by how easy it was to get started with the development environment. I hooked up the IMU's XACCEL output to the A0 input of the Arduino Pro Mini and basically just adapted to AnalogInOutSerial example to output the raw accelerometer value, together with two averaging functions. These were dumped to a file and I fed them into gnuplot to get a hint of how a low-pass filter would perform. This is how it looks:

Red line is the unfiltered input from the accelerometer. Green is filtered using a weighted average algorithm. So is the blue line, but it takes very little of the the fresh input into consideration.

New project

Time for a new project, just like most of them it will probably not be finished in less than 3 or so years. However; the intention this time is to learn a little more about the following things:

• Electronics, especially handling analog sensors such as gyros and accelerometers
• Motor drivers, based on H bridges and MOSFETs
• The Arduino platform (and thus, the AVR-based ATmega328 µC)
• Mechanical constructions
• Control theory and basic digital implementations of control loops

I have always been impressed by the Segway and my first aim is to build a small and simple clone of it based on an Arduino, a couple of gearmotors and wheels from Pololu, an IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit), a motor driver and some other stuff, mostly aquired from http://www.sparkfun.com/.

Today, the first components arrived (from Sweden-based http://www.lawicel-shop.se/):