Development board frees approach to digital sensor chips

18th May 2014

Mick Elliott

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Datasheet

Mouser Electronics is shipping the Freescale Semiconductor’s Freedom Development Platform for Xtrinsic Sensors. This small Arduino‑compatible development board from is a cost-effective platform for evaluating Freescale's digital gyroscope, accelerometer, magnetometer, and position sensors.

The board allows developers to program and evaluate two of Freescale's advanced digital sensor chips. The first is the FXAS21000 XTRINSIC 3‑Axis Gyroscope, a small, low power digital gyroscope that measures yaw, pitch, and roll angular rates.

The board also supports the powerful FXOS8700CQ 6-Axis digital sensor which combines the functions of a 3‑axis 14‑bit accelerometer and a 3‑axis 16‑bit magnetometer on a single chip.

Both sensors provide I2C and SPI interfaces. These chips can be used in a number of applications including an electronic compass for mobile devices, smartphones, virtual reality games and personal navigation devices.

The FRDM-FXS-9AXIS can also be used as an Arduino Shield and is Arduino‑R3 compatible. For development, this sensor shield can be mated to the Freescale FRDM‑KL25Z Freedom Development Platform which is based on a Freescale Kinetis L Series microcontroller with 128KBytes of Flash and 16KBytes of SRAM.

The Freedom Development Platform supports Freescale's Xtrinsic sensor fusion code library which allows developers to experiment with the sensors using pre-written code. A USB interface on the Kinetis MCU board allows for easy programming. An SD card interface is available on the shield board for memory expansion.