IMU

Half a year ago I wrote a blog post about the IMU. In short an IMU is a small board with a 3 axis gyroscope and a 3 axis accelerometer. When rotating this small board you can actually measure the rotation and acceleration of the board. This data is sent to the computer. You can use the data for a kinds of applications. For example for robotics, unmanned aerial vehicles, or advanced motion-capture devices. A couple of months ago I bought one, ArduIMU, build by DIY Drones. And some more months later I finally took the time to give it a try. I simply followed the instructions in the manual and got it working quite easy...on a PC. The problem is that normally use Mac. But when I try to read out the data showing in the Serial Monitor of the Arduino IDE on my Mac, its complete hocus pocus to me. Next step will be filtering and converting the data. I think...

The Mystery of IMU

To measure the movement of the singers head we had the idea to use a Wiimote controller. The Wiimote is cheap and easy to use on a Mac for example by using Osculator to communicate with the Wiimote and the computer. Once the movement data is in the computer you can easily route it via OSC to other applications. In our case we use Isadora. The problem with the Wiimote is that it contains linear accelerometers that measure acceleration along the axes, but no gyroscopes. So it is impossible to measure linear movement along the axes. Recently Nintendo released the Motion Plus extension which ads the gyroscopes to the Wiimote. Only there seems to be no software written yet to measure this data.
So what to do now? Jan Klug gave us the names of possible sensor hardware which we can use. During the research throughout the web I discovered that the device we are looking for has actualy a name. It is called a Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). For now I have two solutions. The first one is to buy a complete but quite expensive system with the Orient3D sensor of Infusion Systems, or the make one myself with Arduino and connected accelerometers and gyroscopes. The last one is pretty hard and time consuming but way more cheaper. You can buy the sensors online at SparksFun. I found some people who are quite active with this.


www.nearfuturelaboratory.com
http://diydrones.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWDXsKlHvIs