BNO080 IMU Board not responding - bricked?

Sensors IMU & Motion
1

I have been using this board using a Qwiic cable to connect to a Sparkfun ESP32 WROOM Thing Plus. It works well in general. However, on a few occasions, a BNO080 board stopped being recognized (ie. in the Arduino library BNO080 the imu.begin() call returns false).

For example if I upload the [following code to my ESP32 on line 46 the myIMU.begin() call returns false.

Like I said, it happened to me twice and once to one of my collaborators. I am merely using the ESP32 connected to the IMU board with a Qwiic cable. There is a LiPo battery connected to the ESP32. The IMU indicator power LED is on but I am unable to connect using i2c anymore. What could cause this and how can I fix it?

Some hypothesis:

2

The first thing to trouble shoot would be replacing the qwiic cables with soldered cables.

When the battery gets low the current starts fluctuating and the ESP32 and/or the IMU reset, which for some reason breaks the IMU.

What do you mean "breaks the IMU"?

Did any of those proposed solutions in the “ESP-family” issue log you linked to work for you?

3

Ok I will try with soldered cables.

By “break the IMU” I mean that I seem to be unable to connect to the IMU through i2c (myIMU.begin() returns false). The power LED is on on the IMU board, showing that it is powered on.

None of the ESP fixes which I posted solved the problem. The clock stretching issue has been fixed in recent versions of the ESP32 core libraries which I am using.

4

If soldered cables doesn’t improve your situation then I would suggest that you can review our returns policy for the possibility of getting an RMA: https://sparkfun.com/returns