The Adafruit Feather ecosystem is so rich with hardware diversity, we wanted to share them, one each day. Today is the Adafruit LSM6DSOX + LIS3MDL FeatherWing – Precision 9-DoF IMU!
Upgrade any Feather board with precision motion sensing with the ST 9-DoF IMU, an all-in-one sensing ‘Wing. It sports two fantastic sensors from ST to provide 9 degrees of full-motion data.
The board includes an LSM6DSOX, a 6-DoF IMU accelerometer + gyro. The 3-axis accelerometer can tell you which direction is down towards the Earth (by measuring gravity) or how fast the board is accelerating in 3D space. The 3-axis gyroscope can measure spin and twist. This new sensor from ST has very low gyro zero rate and noise, compared to the MPU6050 or even LSM6DS33 so it’s excellent for orientation fusion usage: you’ll get less drift and faster responses.
The LSM6DSOX has flexible data rates and ranges. For the accelerometer: ±2/±4/±8/±16 g at 1.6 Hz to 6.7KHz update rate. For the gyroscope: ±125/±250/±500/±1000/±2000 dps at 12.5 Hz to 6.7 KHz. There are also some nice extras, such as built-in tap detection, activity detection, pedometer/step counter, and a programmable finite state machine / machine learning core that can perform some basic gesture recognition.
It also includes a LIS3MDL 3-axis magnetometer that can sense where the strongest magnetic force is coming from, generally used to detect magnetic north. The three triple-axis sensors add up to 9 degrees of freedom, by combining this data you can orient the board. Check out our guide on how to do that!
Both sensors are connected over the shared I2C bus, so you can use it with any and all Feathers! We also break out the interrupt pins and address-selection jumpers in case you want multiple Feathers or have I2C address conflicts. We’ve got both Arduino (C/C++) and CircuitPython libraries available so you can use it with any Feather board and get data readings in under 5 minutes. Four mounting holes make for a secure connection.
Additionally, since it speaks I2C you can easily connect it up with two wires (plus power and ground!). We’ve even included a SparkFun qwiic compatible STEMMA QT connector for the I2C bus so you don’t even need to solder to connect more of your favorite ST sensors like the LPS25! Simply connect a plug-and-play cable to more sensor data, OLED displays, or other I2C devices connected ASAP.
USE
The ST 9-DoF Combo Breakouts and Wings Guide provides details and use examples.
