FreeIMU: An Open Hardware Framework for Orientation and Motion Sensing
This provides a practical tool for developers and researchers working on motion-sensing applications, though it is incremental as it builds on existing platforms like Arduino.
The authors tackled the difficulty of prototyping orientation and motion sensing devices by presenting FreeIMU, an open hardware framework that includes a circuit board with sensors and a software library, enabling easier implementation in research and commercial projects.
Orientation and Motion Sensing are widely implemented on various consumer products, such as mobile phones, tablets and cameras as they enable immediate interaction with virtual information. The prototyping phase of any orientation and motion sensing capable device is however a quite difficult process as it may involve complex hardware designing, math algorithms and programming. In this paper, we present FreeIMU, an Open Hardware Framework for prototyping orientation and motion sensing capable devices. The framework consists in a small circuit board containing various sensors and a software library, built on top of the Arduino platform. Both the hardware and library are released under open licences and supported by an active community allowing to be implemented into research and commercial projects.