Have you ever wondered how your handphone manages to know which direction you are holding it? It uses a device called an accelerometer.
An accelerometer has the ability to measure acceleration of a stationary platform relative to the earth’s surface and a gyroscope has the capability of measuring the rate of rotation around a particular axis. Combine these two and you'll get a module that can sense motion on six-axes: up and down, left and right, forward and backwards, as well as the roll, pitch and yaw rotations. Application that tracks motion precisely and accurately can be created.
These kind of motion sensing are very common nowadays and can be found in mobile phones, tablets, gaming consoles, health/fitness gadgets, navigation devices and recently in laptops as well.
This is a motion processing breakout board based on MPU6050 chip from InvenSense. It has an accelerometer, a gyroscope and a Digital Motion Processing engine all on the same board. Communication to this module can be done using I2C protocol. Operating voltage is between 3V to 5V - suitable for most microcontrollers/microprocessors.
The board has 2 mounting holes. Standard 8-pin 2.54 mm header is included, but not soldered.
Technical details:
Tri-Axis angular rate sensor (gyroscope) with a sensitivity up to 131 LSBs/dps and a full-scale range of ±250, ±500, ±1000, and ±2000dps
Tri-Axis accelerometer with a programmable full scale range of ±2g, ±4g, ±8g and ±16g
Digital Motion Processing™ (DMP™) engine offloads complex MotionFusion, sensor timing synchronization and gesture detection
