New project with gyro sensor and motor control unit

Hello,

i am new to Arduino and want to purchase my first Arduino board.
I read many tutorials and code samples for playing with LEDs and so on and i think that this would be no problem and especially no challenge.
In order to have a real challenge, i want to buy an Arduino board with gyro shields and motor control.

what i want to do:
At first i want to start with simple experiments. reading gyro data and react to it with motor or LEDs.

I would like to have
-3 axis gyro with 3 axis accelerometer
-compass sensor
-motor control for up to 4 motors

-possibility for adding GPS and BT

Now my question:
what Arduino hardware will be recommended ?

I thought of the following parts:
Arduino Board (Romeo?)
6 DOF Sensor
Compass Sensor
Motor Control Unit

now which components are advisable ?

Thank you very much for your help!

An Arduino BT will cover Bluetooth.
A 9-DoF sensor board that has an I2C interface will only use two pins.
A motor control shield takes care of the motors.
A serial GPS module over NewSoftSerial takes care of GPS.

Still leaves you a bunch of pins for other stuff.

Keep in mind that the output from the gyro is a change in angle, not an absolute angle. Same with the accelerometer. It is up to you to use that raw data to define current angle, speed, direction, etc. Not impossible, but not trivial and certainly not done for you.

hello,
many thanks for your advises.

i decide to purchase following devices:

-Arduino Board Romeo
-Gyro Breakout Board - LPY150AL Dual 1500°/s SEN-09425
-LSM303DLH 3D Compass and acceleration sensor Breakout

Are there any experiences with them?

Best Regards

To add to what PaulS mentioned, gyros slowly drift over time. The spec for your gyro has a .2 degree per second drift.

Usually an accelerometer is used with the gyro to give a zero point reference.

I thought of using the Kalman filtering method for getting usable results.

There are some guides here in the forum for implementing it.
Is there a general problem using this filter with my hardware?

I've only done real Kalman filtering once, and it involved crunching large quantities of data. That's not something that would be easy to achieve within the hardware constraints of an Arduino.

would you suggest an other method ?

i read about other projects using the kalman filter

( http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,58048.0.html )

hello,

today i got the first part of my project to work.

the compass and acceleration module provides data.

Now for better visualization.. are there tools to visualize the COM input ?