SparkFun's New VR Breakout Packs a High

SparkFun has launched a new inertial measurement unit (IMU) breakboard board, offering the sort of rotational accuracy you'd need for virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) projects that don't give the user a bout of simulator sickness: the SparkFun VR Breakout BNO086.

"Virtual reality is in, but you shouldn't have to drop hundreds of dollars to gain access to the technology behind it," writes SparkFun's Chris McCarty of the company's latest launch. "Luckily, that's where the SparkFun VR IMU Breakout comes in. At its heart is CEVA's BNO086, a combination triple-axis accelerometer/gyro/magnetometer System in Package (SiP) with a 32-bit Arm Cortex-M0+ [microcontroller]."

The breakout comes with a pair of Qwiic connectors for solderless prototyping, with unpopulated 0.1" pin headers breaking out all of the import signals. The chip at its heart is, as McCarty says, the CEVA BNO086 — originally designed for use in Android smartphones and offering the accuracy for rotational movement to drive the Google Cardboard and later phone-based virtual reality experiments.

This isn't SparkFun's first VR-focused breakout board, though: the company had already designed a near-identical board that used CEVA's earlier BNO080 inertial measurement unit (IMU) chip, which has seen been declared end-of-life by the company. This redesign swaps it out for the pin-compatible BNO086, which brings with it a number of new features — including 14-bit sensor fusion processing on the IMU, an interactive calibration system, and a lower-power idle mode.

For communication, the board can be connected to an I2C bus on one of two jumper-selectable addresses, with the option of SPI or UART communication too. "We've also written an I2C-based library," McCarty adds, "that provides the rotation vector (the reading most folks want from an IMU), acceleration, gyro and magnetometer readings, step counting, and [an] activity classifier (such as riding a bike)."

The SparkFun VR IMU Breakout BNO086 is available on the company store now, priced at $29.95 before volume discounts. More information is available in the board's hookup guide.