Questions on wiring the Accelerometer/Gyro

Technical Electrical
1

I’m pretty new to electronics, and am having trouble figuring out how to wire the accelerometer and the gyro.

According to the guide I found here, I have to

Connect 0V and 5V to the (-) and PWR pins that are just beyond Digital I/O 1, and [CK, DI, DO, CS] in order.

I have several questions. First, there are pins sticking out on both the accelerator end and the Digital I/O. Does that mean I have to splice two of the cable things together to get two female ends? What is the cable thing called anyways?

It seems that CK, DI, DO, and CS are individual pins on the accelerometer. Am I correct in assuming that CK would be wired to Digital I/O 1, DI goes to I/O 2, DO goes to I/O 3, and CS goes to I/O 4? How would that work? The Digital I/O side looks like it requires three holes per slot, whereas each pin on the accelerometer needs only one hole. Are two of the holes on the Digital I/O unused? Which end connects to the accelerometer?

How does that work on the code side? According to the WPILib documentation (for C++), it looks like there are only three constructors for the Accelerometer:


Accelerometer(UINT32 channel)
Accelerometer(UINT8 moduleNumber, UINT32 channel)
Accelerometer(AnalogChannel *channel)

These constructor arguments seem to imply that the Accelerometer is wired up to the Analog Breakout. How does that work, given that the accelerometer is actually wired to the Digital Sidecar?

The instructions for the Gyro were also a bit cryptic to me. It gave basically this table:


 Rate   | Temperature
--------|------------
 +5V    | +5V
--------|------------
 Ground | Ground

What does that mean? Does that also go into the Digital Sidecar? In C++, the Gyro has pretty much the same constructor as the Accelerometer. Does that also mean it goes into the Analog Breakout?

Final question/request. Apparently, Labview comes with example wiring diagrams for this. Our team is using WindRiver and don’t have Labview installed. If it’s not too much trouble, could somebody take a screenshot of the wiring diagram and link to it?

2

As I haven’t worked with the accelerometer for a while, I’ll let someone more familiar with that explain it.

That table there indicates the two different signal circuits on the gyro. The one indicated by “rate” is the signal circuit that returns the actual yaw rate of the gyro. The one indicated by “temperature” is the signal circuit that returns an operating temperature with which to calibrate the gyro output. If you’ve ever used one before, you’ll have noticed that gyros tend to drift; that is, the signal they return is not 100% accurate. Temperature fluctuations can be used in signal processing to eliminate some of this drift. Both the rate and temperature output signals are analog (that is, they use proportional voltage to carry a signal), so they both go into the analog breakout.

3

What we did was IC2 and its those 2 sets of 4 pins next to the phone jack looking port. Make sure to use the 4 pins closer to the phone jack. we just used two 2-pin connectors, the ones with female on both sides.

As far as the gyro is concerned, make sure to plug it into the analog breakout, the thing that goes on the module. https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.usfirst.org/sites/default/files/uploadedFiles/Robotics_Programs/FRC/Game_and_Season__Info/2012_Assets/Analog%20Breakout.pdf

dont forget to change the jumper and the analog breakout needs to have the wires going into the PD board.