Hi everyone
I am a newbie . I have done a few basic Arduino projects. I want to make a clip on type IMU sensor with a digital display of X,Y and Z angles, want it to be a compact independent unit. My requirements are:
A small arduino board powered by button cells or small lithium battery
A small OLED screen which can display 3 lines.
A small accurate IMU shield.
I want the unit to be light weight and not larger than 2inches.
PS: please also suggest if it is possible to pause the readings on the OLED display at a particular position of the IMU sensor by using a remote switch.
An OLED screen is incompatible with button cells. They are very efficient but they still use power to emit light. An LCD will be more efficient as it's not a light emitter.
The smaller Arduinos tend not to have any shields. There's so many different things that people want to do with them that a standard shield won't fit most projects. Find a breakout for the sensor you want and glue it to the back of your small Arduino. If you're really stuck on using a shield, then aTeensy with a Prop Shield will get you started.
As soon as you mention OLED, I'm thinking that perhaps the Microview might be good for your project.
Thanks. I had looked up micro view, my concern is , whether it will be able to display 3 lines , and secondly its a little costly . Can you suggest a small and light weight LCD display.
wvmarle:
The smallest Arduino is the Pro Mini, about 1.3x0.7" board size. Minimal peripherals so pretty power efficient.
For display best may indeed be a monochrome LCD, those take almost no current and are readable in most light situations except total darkness.
LCD with backlighting is also nice. You could either have manual light switch to turn on the backlight for nighttime use and turn it off when it's bright outside. Or if there's a type of light sensor in your project and you have a spare pin, you could have it automatically turn on backlighting when it's dark.
Most small character LCDs have 2 lines. Tiny ones are 8 characters wide. The most common ones are 20 characters wide. 4x20 exists but that's starting to exceed your size specification.
The MicroView is a graphical LCD. You can draw whatever you want. If you make the text small enough, you can have 3 lines.
anyone ever port the Arduino software to the Atmel butterfly ?
inquisitive:
Thanks. I had looked up micro view, my concern is , whether it will be able to display 3 lines , and secondly its a little costly . Can you suggest a small and light weight LCD display.
Thanks . I was also thinking about pro mini, I was thinking of powering the project with a button cell , that is i guess around 3 v. Would it be possible to power al three i.e arduino pro mini, 6050 IMU , and lcd.
Please give details of a small Monochrome LCD and where can I get it.
Oled displays are pretty efficient and have much better contrast than LCD. The power they consume depends greatly on how many pixels are lit, so a few short lines of text won't light many pixels and consume little power. So for example if the text is lit pixels on a black background, it will consume much less power than text displayed as black pixels against a background of lit pixels.
A better alternative to a button cell would be one of the tiny li-ion batteries used in small quadcopters.
Atmel ATSAMD21G18A 32 bit ARM processor at 48MHz, Arduino Zero compatible
0.96" (24.4mm) 96x64 pixel OLED display, 16-bit color depth
Dedicated hardware SPI and control pins to OLED and four onboard buttons
32.728KHz clock crystal, RTC hardware built in with standby mode down to 0.2mA
Expandable with our full lineup of stackable TinyShield boards
Lithium battery connector and charger built in- set to a 200mA charge rate
Ultra compact size and weight (one square inch!)
1.02" x 0.98" (25.8mm x 25.0mm)
Maximum thickness: 6.0mm (0.24 inches)
Weight: 3.94 grams (0.139 ounces)
Atmel 32-bit ATSAMD21G18A ARM Microcontroller
256KB Flash, 32KB SRAM
12-bit ADC, 10-bit DAC
Default Clock speed: 48MHz
2.7V – 5.5V operating voltage
20 IO pins available- up to 10 ADC inputs or up to 10 PWM outputs
Arduino compatible bootloader with CDC Serial port, plug and play on OSX and Windows 10
MPU 9250
3)3.7V 150 mah Li-ion battery.
Or
Arduino pro micro
.96 inch OLED screen
MPU9250
Coin cell/ li ion battery
Please give your opinion as which will be better, I want to keep it as small as posiible and light weight
The samd21 seems overkill for the project, and there is more expertise around for power saving with the Pro Mini, so I would go for that (3.3V, 8MHz version).
To maximise power saving, you could power the display and the sensor directly from output pins on the Pro Mini, so they can be switched off when not needed, for maximum power saving. The Pro Mini could go into deep sleep for perhaps 1s sleeps. When it wakes, it could read the sensor and if there has been a change, power up and update the display and read the sensor again. If there is no change for 30s, it could switch off the display and go back to deep-sleeping for 1s intervals.
Thanks Paul. I am new to arduino so can you please guide me as to in which order should I go about programing the arduino. i am using pro mini.
What Is the project:
I am trying to make a clip on IMU with OLED display which shows the angle values in X,Y,Z axis. I would also like to attach a RF receiver to it so as to stop/pause the display at a particular angle through another arduino board with a RF transmitter.
My Confusion:
How to go about programing the arduino. I have libraries for MPU 9250, OLED . etc. I also have sketches for conversion of IMU readings to Angle, Kalman filter and virtual wire libraries.
Please guide me as to the steps in programing, i.e where should everything come.
Start small, build up slowly and test at each stage.
Start with one or two of the example sketches that come with the various libraries, one by one, to test that you have the hardware wired correctly and working.
If you are completely new to Arduino and programming, take time to go through the basic tutorials on the Arduino site. You need to learn the basics of coding before you start on the sketch for your project, otherwise you won't have a clue what is the various error messages mean.
You will get problems and need to ask for help, that's normal. But please read the forum guidelines in the sticky post so that you know how to post code, error messages, schematics, pictures and links, and you know to avoid saying stupid and annoying things like "but it doesn't work".