This week I collected the necessary bits and got the RPi/IMU set up, as well as placing the order for the battery. It turns out that the manufacturer of the IMU addon board has their own demo code which manages their subset of I2C cleanly — this was much easier to use than the full smbus suite.
The data rate defaults to 100Hz which should be fine for us. The chip also exposes an interface to calibrate the accelerometers, but that’s only for adjusting the resting measurements. We can’t count on the orientation of the device to remain constant, so we probably won’t care to use the feature.
As of now, the RPi is configured to run headless (i.e. only talked to over wireless SSH), so it’s not going to do much more than sit in my room where it knows the WiFi password. Next steps are to set up Bluetooth and to see if there’s a better way to talk to it — preemptively adding WiFi networks by SSID/key is obnoxious.
Our Gantt chart has this as the first of two weeks for bringup, so the project is still fully on-time.