Adafruit's 9DOF (9 Degrees of Freedom) breakout board allows you to capture nine distinct types of motion or orientation related data: 3 degrees each of acceleration, magnetic orientation, and angular velocity.

If you also want barometric data, check out the Adafruit 10DOF breakout, which adds a BMP180 barometric pressure sensor to measure altitude and temperature.

After testing a lot of combinations of sensors, we settled on the following devices that we think offer the best results and the least amount of hassle:
  • LSM303DLHC - a 3-axis accelerometer (up to +/-16g) and a 3-axis magnetometer (up to +/-8.1 gauss) on a single die
  • L3GD20 - a 3-axis gyroscope (up to +/-2000 dps)

Related Links

The Adafruit 9DOF board and library reuses the existing Adafruit drivers for the LSM303DLHC (accelerometer and magnetometer) and the L3GD20 (gyroscope).

For information about these particular drivers, consult the following learning guides:
This breakout is basically just a smooshed together version of both of these so anything you can do with those libraries/guides will follow here.

This guide was first published on Feb 07, 2014. It was last updated on Mar 08, 2024.

This page (Introduction) was last updated on Feb 06, 2014.

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