Photon IMU Shield Hookup Guide

Contributors:

b_e_n

Introduction

Does your Photon project need an accelerometer? What about a gyroscope or a magnetometer? With the SparkFun Photon IMU Shield, you can get all three, thanks to the LSM9DS1 IC module.

The SparkFun Photon IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) Shield is a versatile motion-sensing add-on board for your Photon device that houses a 3-axis accelerometer, 3-axis gyroscope, and 3-axis magnetometer. That’s right, 9 degrees of freedom (9DOF) from a single IC!

Each sensor in the LSM9DS1 supports a large variety of ranges: the accelerometer’s scale can be set to ± 2, 4, 6, 8, or 16 g, the gyroscope supports ± 245, 500, and 2000 °/s, and the magnetometer has full-scale ranges of ± 2, 4, 8, or 12 gauss. As a bonus, the SparkFun Photon IMU Shield comes with the headers already soldered on, so you can plug your Photon (or Core) in and get started!

Please Note: All SparkFun shields for the Photon are also compatible with the Core from Particle. The WKP, DAC and VBT pins on the Photon will be labeled A7, A6 and 3V3*, respectively, on the Core, but will not alter the functionality of any of the Shields.

Covered in this tutorial

This tutorial will cover the functionality of the IMU shield, how to hook it up in your project, and how to program with it using the SparkFun LSM9DS1 Library from the online Particle build environment.

Required Materials

To get started with the Photon IMU Shield you'll want a Photon, a micro-USB cable, and of course the shield itself. You'll also want to sign up for an account on particle.io and register your Photon. Instructions on how to do this can be found at docs.particle.io.