Unsure if this is the right place, but i wanted to ask about the operation of the Optical Tracking Odometry Sensor - PAA5160E1. I have done a bit of research into using optical sensors for tracking through optical flow and suspect this may be an avenue worth looking into for a project i am working on with tracking the surface of a hose within a reel as it is pulled out.
My question is can the data from the optical sensor (i.e. Position in x and Position in y) be sent through without the IMU data fusing with it? I imagine the STM chip is offering two functions, fusing the IMU data in addition to providing a level of isolation/security for the optical sensors operations. For this use case the breakout board would be stationary and the hose ran past it at 10mm offset, would this provide meaningful positional data or does the board outputs require data from the IMU?
Essentially i am looking to track position in +x, -x and then treat this as an encoder reading of sorts for how much hose length has been fed out.
AFAIK it does couple the data, though you could probably just plug in some stationary/dummy values in the 1st example for each poll and use it that way
This is a bit less elegant but I’ve also seen folks use simple photoresistors and white/black tape on hoses at known intervals to accomplish similar
There appears to be registers for: Signal Processing Config (0x0E):
-Enable/Disable Accelerometer
-Enable/Disable Rotation (unsure if this is purely gyro or combination of gyro and optical sensor?)
-Enable Variance (enable/disables kalman filter resulting in raw data (am i likely to want this if only seeking optical data?)
Also in Status (OX1F):
**-**Warning Optical Tracking (if optical data unreliable, use IMU, i imagine i would also want this off?)
I think for proof of concept this breakout should work, as if i can disable the accelerometer, and the board if affixed to the side of a static reel… most measurements should be coming from the optical sensor?
Yep, that’s the register you want! For you application, best to set the rotation and accelerometer bits to 0. For the variance bit, try both 0 and 1 to see what gives you better data (it shouldn’t be a huge difference, might not even matter).
That’s just a status register that is read-only, nothing to set there.
Yes, all X/Y measurements will come from the optical sensor!