The LSM9DS1 is a versatile, motion-sensing system-in-a-chip. It houses a 3-axis accelerometer, 3-axis gyroscope, and 3-axis magnetometer – nine degrees of freedom (9DOF) in a single IC! The LSM9DS1 is equipped with a digital interface, but even that is flexible: it supports both I2C and SPI, so you’ll be hard-pressed to find a microcontroller it doesn’t work with. This IMU-in-a-chip is so cool we put it on the quarter-sized breakout board you are currently viewing!

The LSM9DS1 is one of only a handful of IC’s that can measure three key properties of movement – angular velocity, acceleration, and heading – in a single IC. By measuring these three properties, you can gain a great deal of knowledge about an object’s movement and orientation. The LSM9DS1 measures each of these movement properties in three dimensions. That means it produces nine pieces of data: acceleration in x/y/z, angular rotation in x/y/z, and magnetic force in x/y/z. The LSM9DS1 Breakout has labels indicating the accelerometer and gyroscope axis orientations, which share a right-hand rule relationship with each other.

Each sensor in the LSM9DS1 supports a wide spectrum of ranges: the accelerometer’s scale can be set to ± 2, 4, 8, or 16 g, the gyroscope supports ± 245, 500, and 2000 °/s, and the magnetometer has full-scale ranges of ± 4, 8, 12, or 16 gauss.