The development of the sensor hardware for the balancing uBot began with the purchase of the 2DOF inertial sensing board from Rotomotion. The board features an ADXL202 accelerometer, a rate gyro (probably a Token CG16), and an Atmel AVR (probably ATMega163).

The Rotomotion website publishes code for a Kalman filter with gyro bias. This code was combined with the IMU source code published by the autopilot project so that the IMU writes the tilt and rate of the sensor board at 60Hz over a serial connection.

Programming the Atmel was accomplished under linux using the GNU gcc cross compiler. Rotomotion provides a compilation of the avr toolchain in the support section of their website. Downloading to the AVR chip was done with the Atmel STK500 ISP and the avrdude downloader.

updated 30-April-2004