Has anyone tried this?
I feel CubePurple is a capable hardware and single IMU makes it a bummer.
You’d be better off just replacing the purple with a black or orange: adding an external imu via spi or i2c isn’t a wise engineering decision when a better solution to the problem exists
Yes. I completely agree. But Cubeblack/Orange costs the double of purple. I wonder whether @proficnc has plans to make it dual IMU redundant which would be a good replacement for Pixhawk1 users.
I have been running external IMU on our own hardware and it works well.
I get the rationale, but would still discourage this for anything other than experimentation.
You’ll be at increased risk of EMI, so you’ll need to use shielded cable and the shortest possible cable length.
If you use the same imu on the same bus as CubeBlack or another fmuv3 variant, it will possibly “just work”.
Of course for experimental things. I just want to try out some new IMUs by Bosch.
You’ll need to bake a bespoke firmware to do that: a new “hwdef.dat” for your board. So long as there’s an existing driver, shouldn’t take too much for you to figure out.
Yes. I’ll modify the hwdef.dat accordingly. Ardupilot already supports the drivers for the IMUs I’m planning to test.