Posted 06 June 2018

About a month ago in early May I started another try at adding time, memory, and heading super-powers to Wall-E2’s repertoire.   In this post, I described the effort to add a FRAM board, an RTC board, and a 9DOF MPU9050 IMU board to Wall-E2’s already-existing I2C bus, and in this post I described fabricating a permanent ‘tri-sensor board’ for installation on Wall-E2’s second deck.

After installing the tri-sensor board on the second deck, I did some tests to confirm Wall-E2’s new found ability to make accurate turns, and instead of confirming success, I witnessed complete failure – Wall-E2 was even worse at making turns now than in the past when he was just doing timed turns – WTF!!

Backing up and doing some more tests, it quickly became apparent that the MPU9050 IMU worked fine until Wall-E2’s wheel motors started running, but went completely ga-ga after that.   I tried some quick tests to try and isolate the problem, but didn’t get anywhere.   So, I did what I always do when faced with an apparently intractable problem – I ran away ;-).   OK, I didn’t  really run away, but I decided to put the whole thing on the back burner for a while and let my subconscious work on it for a while (I have discovered over and over again that my subconscious is a  lot smarter than I am).   In the meantime I   had some other stuff to do, like going to a duplicate bridge tournament and going to a grand-daughter’s HS graduation.

After doing some web research, I began to suspect that the problem might be associated with the complexity associated with the Sparkfun 9DOF MPU9050 chip and the associated yaw/pitch/roll computation software, so I decided to see if there were other IMU solutions out there.   I ran across the DFRobots MPU-6050 6DOF IMU breakout board.

Since I wasn’t planning to use this for anything but yaw (z-axis rotation) information, the 6DOF limitation wasn’t a problem, and the integrated  Digital Motion Processorâ„¢ (DMP) should simplify the control software.   In addition, the IMU6050 board is 5V compatible, so I can eliminate the level-shifting hardware required for the Sparkfun 9250 unit.   So, I ordered a couple of units and started playing with them.   Using the supplied libraries from DFRobots and their little example program,   I was able to get the unit up and running fairly quickly.   To test the ability to report yaw excursions, I modified the test program to report only yaw, and manually turned the sensor around its Z-axis.   As shown below, the yaw progressed smoothly.

Next, I mounted just the IMU6050 board on the robot’s 2nd deck, as shown below, and ran some tests with and without the motor running.

As shown above, with the sensor mounted on the 2nd deck and with motors  not running, I got a smooth response from the yaw sensor as the robot was manually rotated.   However, when I tried the same trick with the motors running, I got the following plot:

Then I mounted the sensor on an ‘air pillow’ (one section of a piece of air-filled packing material) and tried again, once again getting a smooth plot, even with one motor running.