I was about to send you an email asking the following 2 questions.
- do you sell the freeIMU boards as well? I know sparkfun has a similar board but I was wandering how much would it cost to buy it off of you directly
Yes, that's possible some time. I may have some spare prototypes. Please discuss this privately (mail me: fvaresano at yahoo dot it) as I don't want to pollute the thread with commercial stuff.
- do you think that the IMU can be done on the lower level version without magnetometers?? Solving the yaw missing piece somehow and the drifting problem? From your thesis it seems possible, but on the discussions we've been having on this forum post it seems as there are some drifting problems or some information (yaw) which cannot be obtained.
You can compute the orientation of an IMU (gyro+accelerometer) but you will have always small drifting on the yaw. You need a magnetometer to fix the yaw drifting.
These days, there is the very good HMC5883L magnetometer which costs about $2 raw, so, with such a small increase in price, I wouldn't buy an IMU without a magnetometer.