About I_Bela

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am designing the hardware for a system, which stabilizes a boat on the sea, to avoid the hot coffe to spill from the cup. As a sensor, I'm considering to use an IMU from Bosch Sensortec. The choice is surprising rich, at the moment I'm considering BHA260AB as a first try. I started to read the datasheet, the flyer and whatever is given by manufacturer. Unfortunately, some things are confusing, and I'm getting a bit frustrated. It is written in the datasheet: " Integrated BSX sensor fusion software for reliable 3D orientation, activity recognition, and more " (page 2) It sounds super, but does it mean, that we don't need to develop our own combining filter algorithms, some Kalman filtering and so on? Can we read out the already combined and stabilized position and movement data through the host interface? Also on page 2 there are another sentence: " It can boot from a wide variety of hosts, ranging from a small Cortex-M0™ MCU up to multicore application processors. " And, as I read the datasheet towards, it is written, that during this boot process, a firmware must be downloaded to the sensor, either from the host processor or from an external flash memory. Than, my question is: isn't there a built-in firmware in the sensor's processor? Doesn't it work as a standalone sensor? What is the "pre-installed integrated sensor fusion and other sensor processing software "? (BHA260 flyer, 1st page) What SW is preloaded into the on-chip ROM? I suppose 144kByte is  too much for just a downloader ... In case this sensor requires our own firmware to function, I'm still opened for another device as well. This sensor is important, but only a part in a more complex system, therefore I don't want to spend months to learn it. My idea is: drop in a sensor, and the FW developer colleague can read it through I2C or SPI, and done. Is it possible or am I too idealistic? Thank You in advance for any further information. ... View more