It’s working!


After what feels like a 1000 mount­ing attempts, we finally made one board of the first gen­er­a­tion work! So 4 IMUs, wire­less trans­mis­sion, bat­tery pow­er­ing and real­time step­wise dead reck­on­ing. To say the least I’m pretty relieved to see the whole chain work­ing. We are still expect­ing updated ver­sions of the boards but there are (should be) no changes to the schematic so hope­fully they should work right out of the box.

The bat­tery cables should later on be sol­dered straight into the board but due to fur­ther test­ing needs we didn’t want to do that. Con­se­quently, you see the ugly solu­tion with a JST con­nec­tor and a pin header, and for the ini­tial test­ing we had to go with elec­tri­cal tape instead of the cas­ing lid.

Above you see the first (actu­ally sec­ond, since the first time I got about 5m and then the bat­tery cable came off) track­ing result with the unit taped to the fore­foot and walk­ing back and forth in the cor­ri­dor two times. Note that Mat­lab is only sum­ming up the step dis­place­ments and head­ing changes and most of the pro­cess­ing is done in the module.

Plenty of things remain to be done but at least now we know we will even­tu­ally have work­ing modules!

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