Could you source / sell a 9-dof sensor (accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope), but of higher quality (industrial grade) compared with what you have currently in stock? Something in the kind of this one from Adafruit for example: https://www.adafruit.com/product/4569 (Adafruit ISM330DHCX + LIS3MDL FeatherWing - High Precision 9-DoF IMU).
These are really attracting to me, and I end up buying quite a lot (which is annoying; I like better Sparkfun, and I have to place 2 orders, 1 at Sparkfun and 1 at Adafruit, each time I build one of my boards).
The attracting features that I would love to see in an equivalent Sparkfun product:
These fit nicely in the spectrum, for cases when I do want some high accuracy, and I do not trust / cannot use a chip with built in Kalman filter. I end up using these 9-dof to perform measurements, and running the AHRS Kalman filter ( https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_AHRS ), and I do get better results than with the BNO08x chips then.
Excellent suggestions! I’ll forward this to our Product Development Team and maybe they’ll whip up something 
Sounds excellent 
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The title of the post was wrong btw, meant “industrial”, not commercial . Something with “as high quality as possible withing 50 USD for a 9-dof, calibrated and thermally compensated” would be amazing .
Was discussing it in a meeting today with some colleagues, having a breakout with:
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Qwiic connector
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many available pins (power, SPI, I2C)
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solder pads for selecting address
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power LED with cuttable trace (for being able to go low power)
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thermal compensation built in
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“as high performance as possible” within 50 USD
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focus on low power (with cut LED pads / traces)
would be really useful .
You might consider learning a CAD program and solder paste stenciling.
Those skills along with some parts, some solder paste, a good pair of tweezers, parts and a hot plate would enable you to create your own custom boards to whatever specification you like.
That way you don’t have to hope someone will build what you want, you can create it yourself whenever you want.
Well, actually, I am already very happy with the Adafruit board I name at the start (the : https://www.adafruit.com/product/4569 (Adafruit ISM330DHCX + LIS3MDL FeatherWing - High Precision 9-DoF IMU). The only annoying thing with these boards is that then I need to source from different shops for assembling my designs, which means more shipping fees, more administration to get my job to order the parts, etc… I need to produce “small series” of 10-15 systems now and then, so it is really convenient that all I need is to connect with a qwiic cable, I do not really want to start making my own boards on my own.
I guess a possibility would be that SF simply grabs the CAD files of the Adafruit shield, improves here and there and / or update the sensors if a newer higher performance version has become available since it was designed, and produce it? .
As a side note: I was initially thinking about using one of these modern IMUs will all on-board including Kalman filtering that everybody talks about. But I had so much issues with the BNO08x and the Artemis platform, and the Kalman filter of the ICM-20948 is not good enough for my needs / I am not happy with its performance, that I ended up trying to use a good 9-dof instead, and run the AHRS Kalman filter on the Artemis. The result is quite inexpensive, actually surprisingly high performance (for my use, better than any other cheap IMU I had tried, and actually matching the quality of the results I get with a 1000USD VN100), and also very power effective since the 9-dof use little power, and the Artemis is super power efficient. That was just for the background of why I am interested again in 9-dofs while IMUs sound more attractive - and I believe that this may actually be true for many people .
Thanks for the suggestion, we will add it to the que for review. This is not a guarantee that SFE will produce the device in question. Should we create the product it will be in one of our news letters before release and would hit the website shortly after.
Cheers.
Sounds excellent, crossing fingers .
As a side note: this product is very often sold out, so think Adafruit sells quite a lot of them .
" calibrated and thermally compensated"
Magnetometer calibration MUST be done in the final installation. Factory calibration is rarely. if ever useful. Comprehensive tutorial at https://thecavepearlproject.org/2015/05 … r-arduino/
“I do get better results than with the BNO08x chips then.”
Just about any modern, high end, properly calibrated 9DOF sensor, such as the LSM9DS1 or ICM-90248, will outperform those poorly programmed products, even using the simple and fast Madgwick or Mahony filter. Sensor noise and unavoidable environmental influences are the primary limitations.
For professional applications, avoid noisy MEMS sensors entirely, and be prepared to pay accordingly more.
Ok, right, agree, the magnetometer calibration is done inside the product, but the accelerometer on the Adafruit breakout is " calibrated and thermally compensated" [calibrated is usual of course, but the thermally calibrated is what is particularly attractive to me ].
I think the high end “industrial” MEMS in the Adafruit sensor does make a difference for me. At least, I will stick to some similar kind of “industrial” MEMS personally. If SF produces a breakout and sells it, amazing, if not, I will just go adafruit on this one .