All Marvelmind Beacons have a 6D Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) that consists of a 3D accelerometer and a 3D gyroscope. There are only two exceptions in our products:
Check Wiki definitions first: gyroscope.
Important to remember:
See live IMU performance: revolving cube – this functionality is for our R&D purpose and is not available in the Dashboard by default. But you can easily see the gyroscope and accelerometer graphs in the Dashboard:
Notice that our beacons do not have magnetometers inside. However, it could be possible to quite easily connect them to a Super-Beacon via an available I2C or UART, or SPI interface. We do not recommend using magnetometers indoors because of the high potential distortion of the Earth’s magnetic field by ferromagnetic metals, the ferromagnetic metal body of your mobile object, and the magnetic fields of currents of wiring indoors or on your mobile devices.
Instead, we recommend using the Paired Beacons: you install two or more mobile beacons on your mobile objects with as large a base as your mobile object can provide and enjoy very accurate direction data even in static:
To avoid confusion, IMU (gyroscope) does not provide a direction. It provides a change of direction. Very accurate, precise, stable, and relatively low drift even without calibration. But it is not a direction. It is a change of direction against some chosen direction.
GPS does not provide directions either. GPS gives just a location – not a direction.
It is possible to get directions with only a single beacon and IMU:
You can get IMU data from:
IMU data includes:
Download the Protocol description for more detail.
If anything is unclear, contact us via info@marvelmind.com