When I came across the 6Dof imu v1 at sparkfun I thought all my prayers were answered but my joy was quickly squashed. In my naivety I thought it could measure reasonable accurate movements in 3d right off the shelf which it does - for a few seconds.
A few months down the line I have read up on the capabilities of imus and the problems with these devices. IMUs are inheritantly inaccurate - each component - accelerometer, gyro and 3 axis mag have huge disadvantages on their own so all three are stuck on a board and are supposed to compensate for the other components weakness. Here lies the problem - To join the the 3 gyros, 3 accelerometers and 3 axis magnetometer you need some kind of software filter that fuses all the readings together and comes up with a reasonably accurate estimation of orientation in real time- the one that is most useful is the kalman filter. Now, if you’ve ever looked at a paper “explaining” the Kalman filter you will quickly understand, this is not for a hobbyist. I spoke to a mathmatician who writes software tools for the Kalman filter and he informed me that people spend their entire lives getting them to work properly - Good luck!
There are useful sites rotomotion for example have had a Kalman filter in development for some while to use with their IMu for which the source code is available but again unless you’ve got a brain the size of a planet etc.
Finally to the point, I’m in no way complaining about Sparkfun or it’s products because I think what they are doing is fantastic, my concern is with the IMU 6Dof V3 - even it sounds like a great product, without supplying some way of fusing the measurements, Imu V3 and earlier versions are kind of useless.
If someone has come with a way to get these working or implimented a simple filter of some kind - I love to hear about it.
best
Paul