Sensors and Interfaces with the Beaglebone Black

written on 12 Jan 2014 by Andrew Dai

The BeagleCar needs sense of location and direction. This is where the GPS and IMU (accelerator/gyroscope) come into play. The GPS gives noisy readings in the current absolute position while the IMU can give rapid and fairly accurate readings on relative position. The GPS is also fairly slow 1-10 hz while the IMU can update much faster. Together, they combine both absolute position with rapid relative updates to yield (hopefully) sufficiently accurate location readings.

IMU: Invensense MPU-6050

Connecting the board

I started with the 6 axis accelerometer/gyroscope. It communicates via an I2C interface. Careful reading of Sparkfun and Beaglebone documentation helped me wire up the board.

To connect the IMU to I2C bus 1:

  • VDD to Pin 9_3 (3.3V)
  • VIO to Pin 9_3 (3.3V)
  • Gnd to Pin 9_1
  • SCL to Pin 9_19 (I2C Bus 1 Serial Clock)
  • SDA to Pin 9_20 (I2C Bus 1 Serial Data)

Probing with i2c-tools

I tested this connection with the i2c-tools already installed in the default Angstrom distribution. i2cdetect looks for any I2C devices connected to a specified bus (in our case i2c bus 1). i2cdump reads all of the information from a specified I2C device; i2cget and i2cset work in the same way on specific memory registers on a device.

root@beaglebone:~# i2cdetect -y -r 1
    0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  a  b  c  d  e  f
00:          -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
10: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
20: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
30: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
40: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
50: -- -- -- -- UU UU UU UU -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
60: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 68 -- -- -- -- -- -- --
70: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
root@beaglebone:~# i2cdump -y 1 0x68
No size specified (using byte-data access)
    0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  a  b  c  d  e  f    0123456789abcdef
00: 81 7d 00 1d 3c cd fc ae 05 44 08 5c 28 8f 6e 90    ?}.?<????D?\(?n?
10: d4 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00    ?...............
20: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00    ................
30: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00    ................
40: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00    ................
50: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00    ................
60: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 40 00 00 00 00    ...........@....
70: 00 00 00 00 00 68 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00    .....h..........
80: 81 7d 00 1d 3c cd fc ae 05 44 08 5c 28 8f 6e 90    ?}.?<????D?\(?n?
90: d4 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00    ?...............
a0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00    ................
b0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00    ................
c0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00    ................
d0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00    ................
e0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 40 00 00 00 00    ...........@....
f0: 00 00 00 00 00 68 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00    .....h..........

Reading through the Invensense documentation reveals that bit 6 on register 0x6b must be set to 0 for the device to exit sleep mode. Currently register 0x6b is 0x40 or 0b0100000, meaning that the 6th bit is 1 and the device is sleeping (bits are counted right to left with the right-most bit being bit 0 and the left-most bit 7). Using i2cset -y 1 0x68 0x6b 0x00 sets the register to all zeros and then a call to i2cdump -y 1 0x68 shows that the sensor is active.

Test script

I wrote this little test script to at least get some meaningful values from the sensor. It uses the Adafruit_BBIO library to do the I2C interface heavy lifting. All it does is print the acceleration on the x axis in g’s to the console. The code is also on my github.

from Adafruit_I2C import Adafruit_I2C
from time import sleep

# initialize i2c connection to MPU6050
# i2c address is 0x68
i2c = Adafruit_I2C(0x68)

# wake up the device (out of sleep mode)
# bit 6 on register 0x6B set to 0
i2c.write8(0x6B, 0)

print("X axis accelerations (in g's)")

# read and print acceleration on x axis
# Most significant byte on 0x3b
# Least significant byte on 0x3c
# Combined to obtain raw acceleration data
for x in range(0, 5):
        # getting values from the registers
        b = i2c.readS8(0x3b)
        s = i2c.readU8(0x3c)
        # converting 2 8 bit words into a 16 bit
        # signed "raw" value
        raw = b * 256 + s
        # still needs to be converted into G-forces
        g = raw / 16384.
        print (str(g))
        sleep(0.2)

Adafruit Ultimate GPS Breakout (v3)

Adafruit’s breakout is 5 volt tolerant which is a bonus for Arduino compatibility but not necessary for this project since the Beaglebone is a 3.3 volt device. It communicates over a serial UART connection and is fairly easy to setup with the BBB.

(After encountering numerous issues with gpsd I chose to reflash the BBB with Ubuntu. Maybe I’ll write a guide in the future but just Googling “beaglebone flash ubuntu” should be sufficient)

My plan is to use gpsd to do the dirty work of interpreting the raw NMEA sentences from the breakout and then use the Python interface to write a client to handle all the data and control the robot (and even pass it into ROS … if I can get it to install on UbuntuARM 13.04).

Wiring up the GPS

The breakout has numerous additional features but for now I’m just trying to get basic funcationlity out of the device. UART is just serial communication. This just means that a wire connects the transmit (TX) pin of one device to the receive (RX) pin of the other and vice versa. Knowing this, I connected TX on the breakout to RX of UART1 (pin 9_26) on the Beaglebone and RX to TX (pin 9_24). VIN connects to 3.3v (pin 9_3) and Gnd to ground (pin 9_1)

Schematic showing how to connect the GPS to a Beaglebone Black

Installing and Using gpsd

Sidenote: The Beaglebone community is still fairly small right now and it is often easier to search for and follow guides for the Raspberry Pi, especially after installing Ubuntu or Debian because of the Pi’s Debian-based OS.

gpsd is a Linux daemon to parse the NMEA sentences coming from GPS devices. By using it, I can concentrate on using the GPS data rather than dealing with the nitty gritty details of parsing text (and opens up the possibility of using other GPS devices that have slightly different formats - yay portability!).

gpsd comes in several packages. gpsd is the core package containing the daemon, gpsd-clients has several test clients, and python-gps installs the Python library to communicate with gpsd (I know for a fact that python-gps is not a package available on Angstrom - it is under a different name).

After running into a brick wall with gpsd on Angstrom, I elected to switch to Ubuntu and reflashed the BBB.

On Ubuntu, I installed gpsd with

sudo apt-get install gpsd gpsd-clients python-gpsd

Then with the breakout board wired up (TX and RX as well as VIN to 3.3V and GND to ground), I started gpsd and pointed it to UART1 where the device lived.

gpsd -n /dev/ttyO1 -F /var/run/gpsd.sock
cgps

  • -n tells gpsd not to wait for client requests and immediately start posting GPS data. This is useful for testing and debugging. If power consumption is important, you might consider leaving out that option.

  • /dev/ttyO1 (that is an “O” not “0”) is the location of the serial connection. gpsd defaults to /dev/USB0 for USB devices.

  • -F /var/run/gpsd.sock … I don’t actually know why this is necessary… maybe defaults sometimes aren’t correct?

  • cgps is a console gps test client to test if everything is working. Keep in mind that GPS devices take a while to lock on a signal. If you just plugged in the device it might not be able to display any location information for upto 15 minutes.

If that doesn’t work…

References