Meant to be Seen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrlexnMARZw

Just testing the Pololu MinIMU-9 v2. A "9DOF" IMU: http://www.pololu.com/catalog/product/1268

Looks decent so far.

Granted, I am just using the default sensor fusion code I found online. I may be able to get better performance with more optimized code. I also feel maybe there is some filtering or smoothing going on, so I will have to look deeper into this. But even so, it looks OK. I doubt it is as good as the Rift tracker, but should be fine for what I need it for.

It was only $40, so the price is nice. However, there is no USB interface. They just provide the board, I needed to solder a bit and use an Arduino to interface with the PC.

Anybody else interested in this?

Sounds really good, if my android phone doesn't cover my expectatives for tracking in the DIY Rift that I will build when i recive the lcd and lenses then i should investigate other tracking methods like this, it's possible that this IMU works well with vireio perception with freepie or something like that?

This one looks a bit cheaper - http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1677559

I am going to have a play around with them soon; I am hoping I can get several wired up to one Arduino (not a nano, a bigger one) to make a limb tracking system.

Chriky wrote:This one looks a bit cheaper - http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1677559

I am going to have a play around with them soon; I am hoping I can get several wired up to one Arduino (not a nano, a bigger one) to make a limb tracking system.

Beware that mounting the IMU on the Arduino overlapped like shown in the picture at your link is not recommended. Later posts suggest flipping it over and extending it outward, or better, moving it farther away using a connecting cable. I have these devices, and I plan to play with them when I get around to it...

I think it was a post by cybereality that first made me aware of this less expensive IMU.

I plan to stay away from all the GPL code though. I want to keep my codebase "GPL-free" so I can use it in commercial projects.

Chriky wrote:This one looks a bit cheaper - http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1677559

I am going to have a play around with them soon; I am hoping I can get several wired up to one Arduino (not a nano, a bigger one) to make a limb tracking system.

It's really cheap and seems to works great!, It would be possible to use this with vireio or freepie for a DIY Rift?

You'd have to code support in Vireio or FreePIE. Maybe there is some standard way to come up with so that many different IMUs can all interface.

cybereality wrote:You'd have to code support in Vireio or FreePIE. Maybe there is some standard way to come up with so that many different IMUs can all interface.

You need a standard interface (HAL) layer, because different brands of sensor may pad zeros on the left, and others on the right, and they may have different initialization required. Such things already exist for a large collection of different sensors, which I found when searching for "GY-85" (the cheap sensor above). It seems to be very popular not so much from its low price, but from its accuracy and stability. It is a popular sensor. But the software that manages it also handles many more... I may provide a link later. I do not want to google it right now. Sorry...

Has anyone played with UNIDUINO ? an interfaces between Unity & Arduino...

i have the minImu9-v2 for my DIY-rift (more on that someday when i get the change to write up on it), and i'm using currently trough a Raspberry PI (with code taken intially from http://blog.davidegrayson.com/2012/11/o ... ry-pi.html) , and it seems quite fast and somewhat accurate. My main issue at the moment is the "noise" i'm getting: when the sensor just sits on the table , the values are not very static. When moving slightly it works better. Anyone else having same kind of issue?

My current setup is not too optimal at the moment, the IMU code in Raspberry also has small server component, and i'm connecting to it from test made with Irrlicht-engine that handles the 3D stuff, with distortion done by troffmo5:s code. Raspberry is taking about 3ms per cycle at the moment, but this might be some poor optimization issue, but i'd be interested that what kind of samplerates have others gotten of the minIMU ?

I'm planning to replace that minIMU + Raspberry combo with STM32FDISCOVERY board(s) , since it has the exact same sensors, and it should have the power to do the orientation calculation too, and USB interface. But, i'm still also interested in the minIMU, so any experiences are of interest to me too , and i'm planning to (try) to use the Raspberry + camera module for some visual stuff relating to rift..

WOW, cool stuff cyber, I've been pretty quiet on the threads for a while, but i should be able to unveil some of my own projects soon. Sadly i still havent been able to purchase my own pololu imu yet, due to school, but now its the summer time!

@phlebas: The Pololu IMU seems pretty stable from my tests, I did not notice any major jitter. However I think the code I found is doing some filtering, so maybe it is already correcting for it. I'm going to dive deeper at some point, since I want to reduce latency as much as possible (but even now it is usable).

@Dantesinferno: Hey man! Was thinking of you when I made this thread, since you were the one that told me about the Pololu. Wasn't sure if you were still around, but nice to see you're lurking.