This guide is deprecated. It is out of date for the Pi 3 and later boards. It is here for historical reference only.

For information on the BNO055 and interfacing, the sensor guide has more up to date information.

 

Are you looking for an easy way to detect orientation, or how something is rotated?  You could use a 9 or 10-degree of freedom breakout that includes an accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, and more but what do you do once you have all that sensor data?  Unless you're an expert in Kalman filters and advanced math you'll need some way to fuse all the noisy raw sensor data into an accurate orientation reading.  Luckily the BNO055 absolute orientation sensor can handle all the tricky sensor fusion for you using a little on-board ARM processor.  Using a Python module you can talk to the BNO055 sensor from your Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black and bring the magic of orientation sensing to your next project!

In this guide I'll show how to connect a BNO055 absolute orientation sensor to a Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black. I'll also show how to use a Python module to talk to the sensor and get orientation readings. Finally I'll walk through a demonstration of the sensor that uses WebGL to display and rotate a 3D model on a webpage based on the orientation of the BNO055 sensor.

Before you get started you'll want to read the BNO055 guide, and make sure you're familiar with connecting to a Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black using SSH.

When you're ready continue on to learn what parts you'll need and how to connect the BNO055 to your hardware.

This guide was first published on Jul 20, 2015. It was last updated on Mar 08, 2024.

This page (Overview) was last updated on Mar 08, 2024.

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