I feel kind of dumb asking this. . . can you confirm that there is no IMU onboard the Magni?
Correct. There is no IMU onboard today.
There is no IMU, but if you really want one consider the Raspberry Pi sense hat.
Remember that all the raspberry pi pins route out through sonar board - so at least in principal you can hook something like that in. Beware that there are additional power connectors in there as well and you need to avoid those as you hook up something like this IMU
I am not sure the raspberry Pi sense hat can be used in a Magni unit.
We plug in the Raspberry Pi into the Magni motor controller board now.
Additionally there is a very limited area above the back of the Pi for clearance.
So this is interesting and I will investigate by ordering one now as I do a TON of Raspberry Pi work both for my own hobby robot work (typically on ROS and our UR kernel by the way).
Would not hurt to have one anyway. I will report back to this thread later in the week.
Bought the Raspberry Pi Sense Hat and it got here today.
Although a ‘nifty’ gizmo with loads of fun for IMU, temp, humidity and very fun 8x8 RGB led array it is not in my mind able to be used in a Magni.
The raspberry Pi must plug into the magni motor controller connector.
When you plug on the RasPi Sense hat there are no longer any pins there to plug into the Magni.
A very fun and even valuable item but not if you must plug into the Pi as well after it is installed.
I personally often run the Magni motor controller from a Raspberry Pi on my bench (to test motor controllers) and for this usage I power the Pi from it’s own supply then plug in using a short set of wires ground, +3.3V, the two I2C line and the two serial port lines. This works great fine So if one really needed the Sense hat it could be done but the user would have to work out a way to mount the offboard raspberry Pi in some sturdy way.
Livin the Dream, livin the dream!