Best gyro for frc.

[Mark Sheridan]

Originally Posted by Mk.32

Is there a place to get an pre-made IMU for this gyro? Quick googling doesn't seem to bring up anything state side.

The part # for the evaluation board is : EVAL-ADXRS453Z

Mouser and digikey sell these.

Never actually used this but I had it bookmarked to buy eventually.

[Jduffy]

We tried to use an MPU6050 breakout and arduino last year, but combining everything fairly difficult, so we just bought a nav6 from kauai http://www.kauailabs.com/store/index...&product_id=50
They're $70, but designed to work with a cRio out of the box, and will probably work with an rRio with a serial cable. It worked over usb to my computer, and the new rio runs linux, so it should be fairly easy to set up.

We used it to make our swerve field-centric, and it only floats by a degree or two throughout the match, which is about as good as you'll get with a cheap chip gyro.

If you want to make your own, arduino and an MPU6050 is a good place to start, there are several good libraries and explanations to get you up and running fairly quickly.

[slibert]

Originally Posted by Jduffy

We tried to use an MPU6050 breakout and arduino last year, but combining everything fairly difficult, so we just bought a nav6 from kauai http://www.kauailabs.com/store/index...&product_id=50
They're $70, but designed to work with a cRio out of the box, and will probably work with an rRio with a serial cable. It worked over usb to my computer, and the new rio runs linux, so it should be fairly easy to set up.

We used it to make our swerve field-centric, and it only floats by a degree or two throughout the match, which is about as good as you'll get with a cheap chip gyro.

If you want to make your own, arduino and an MPU6050 is a good place to start, there are several good libraries and explanations to get you up and running fairly quickly.

If you want to use the arduino and the MPU6050 and assemble something yourself, I highly recommend you ensure that the interrupt pin from the MPU-6050 is connected to the Arduino. This will allow interrupt-driven operations which is the way to get good performance. If you go to the nav6 website (https://code.google.com/nav6) you'll see schematics that show how to hook it up. All the nav6 open source code is available there too - and it's Arduino-compatible w/an Arduino UNO.

Do keep in mind that the MPU-6050 is a 3.3V part, and isn't 5V tolerant, so you'll need to take care of that. The nav6 does that, and also allows powering directly off the 12V robot battery.

One of the nice things about using the nav6 firmware, even if you assemble it yourself, is it will work w/all the WPI classes (java, C++) as well as w/the LabView VIs (these are also on the nav6 website). A few people who have the RoboRio beta systems are testing out the nav6 on the RoboRio, and although I haven't got word yet how well it's working for them we expect it should work just fine.

If you have any questions, please contact me at scott@kauailabs.com.