MPU-9250 right for the job?

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I’m a fourth year Computer Science student working on my final year project, which happens to involve sensors. Unfortunately I have no prior experience with electronics (neither does my supervisor :frowning: ) and after some research I’m still feeling unsure about a few things.

In essence, for the project I want to have two IMU’s on a bike (one at the front, one at the back) and be able to read sensor data from these during a test ride. After the ride I’m hoping to be able to access this data and use it to try and classify terrain (i.e. roughness, steep decent, sharp turns).

In short, will two IMU’s e.g. 2x MPU-9250 wired to a raspberry pi (Strapped to the bike) work for this kind of project?

Additionally I know there may be fair bit of effort required to extract the kind of information I want from these IMU’s, and this is outwith the scope of my fourth year project. Can anyone recommend another kind of (probably more expensive) sensor that would make my life easier for this?

Once I know I have the right kind of sensor I’ll invest in purchasing them and start to experiment, but I don’t want to waste money on something that’s not going to be sufficient.

Thanks!

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Are we talking a man-powered bicycle or motor-bike?

I don’t see why the 2 MPU-9250 shouldn’t work. But you’ll likely find the pedaling oscillations of the cyclist more prevalent in the data than what vibrations the surface excites on the bike.

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The BNO055 absolute orientation sensor is very easy to use, and reasonably accurate as long as you go through the built in calibration procedure.

It must be mounted away from magnets or magnetic materials, which will confuse the magnetometer.

The simplest Arduino is fine for reading out the data, and storing on an SD card (I recommend the Sparkfun OpenLog for the latter).

https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-bno … r/overview

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Thanks for the answers guys. I’ve decided to go with a SparkFun 9DoF Razor IMU M0 since there seems to be a lot less of a learning curve.