These motion sensing FeatherWings allow you to sense motion in 9 degrees of freedom. They work by incorporating two different, but complementary sensors. The LIS3MDL is a 3-axis magnetometer that can sense where the strongest magnetic force is coming from, generally used to detect magnetic north.

The other sensor on these boards has a 3-axis accelerometer and 3-axis gyroscope, which are used to detect linear acceleration and angular velocity. Adafruit has a couple of boards where this sensor differs.

For the accelerometer + gyro, this board includes the LSM6DSOX, a 6-DoF IMU. The 3-axis accelerometer can tell you which direction is down towards the Earth (by measuring gravity) or how fast the board is accelerating in 3D space. The 3-axis gyroscope can measure spin and twist. This new sensor from ST has very low gyro zero rate and noise, compared to the MPU6050 or even LSM6DS33 so it's excellent for orientation fusion usage: you'll get less drift and faster responses.

The LSM6DSOX has flexible data rates and ranges. For the accelerometer: ±2/±4/±8/±16 g at 1.6 Hz to 6.7KHz update rate. For the gyroscope: ±125/±250/±500/±1000/±2000 dps at 12.5 Hz to 6.7 KHz. There are also some nice extras, such as built-in tap detection, activity detection, pedometer/step counter, and a programmable finite state machine / machine learning core that can perform some basic gesture recognition.

For the accelerometer + gyro, this board includes the ST ISM330DHCX, which is an industrial quality Accelerometer+Gyroscope 6-DOF IMUs (inertial measurement unit). This IMU sensor has 6 degrees of freedom - 3 degrees each of linear acceleration and angular velocity at varying rates within a respectable range. For the accelerometer: ±2/±4/±8/±16 g at 1.6 Hz to 6.7KHz update rate. For the gyroscope: ±125/±250/±500/±1000/±2000/±4000 dps at 12.5 Hz to 6.7 KHz. In particular, this is one of the few gyro's we stock with 4000 dps range, usually they top out at 2000. This sensor has extra calibration and compensation circuits to give it excellent performance in a wide environmental range from -40 to +105°C. Most other IMU sensors don't have industrial temperature ranges or have wide accuracy variation as the temperature changes. The accelerometer and gyroscope also are on the same silicon die, which will keep the 6 measurements synchronized better than when the two sensors are on separate dies.

There are also some nice extras, such as built-in tap detection, activity detection, pedometer/step counter and a programmable finite state machine / machine learning core that can perform some basic gesture recognition.