 that a great search brought to you by DigiKey and Adafruit, where later it uses all our powers of engineering and searching for parts to help you find that part that you need, especially when the rug gets yanked out underneath you and your bomb cost goes up 1,000 percent. Yeah, well not a thousand, but you know a bunch. So we were just chatting about the LSM90S1. I thought this was interesting. We wrote about it, the price, the official price of this chip. Not only is it, you can't buy this chip, but the official price went from about $4 to about $20. And one of our back orders, you know, not from DigiKey, but from another distributor that we had placed months ago, basically got canceled because it was like, well, we're not going to sell it to you at the original price. You have to replace it with this new price. And so I thought if there's people who are using this chip, look, I like the LSM90S1. I've used it. It's wonderful. I use the LSM90SO. I love all the ST jars and accelerometers I am used, but if you have a board and you are speccing this part at about $3 to $4, and now it's coming back to you at $20, that can really, really mess your bill of materials, right? If you're selling, you know, a gaming thing and it had accelerometer in it, you know, motion sensor. And suddenly the bill of materials cost just went up $15. That could easily double the cost of your product. And so I thought, you know, I think eventually the price will come back down because I don't think this is competitive at this price. However, until that happens, let's see, you know, some alternatives for nine DOF sensors. I wanted to show people because I had actually had somebody ask me like, what would you use instead? And I was like, that's a good idea for the great search. However, I'm not going to make that name public. So that's why there's no quote. So I'm behind the scenes. Okay, so one of the nice things about the LSM90SO is it's a nine axis. It's an accelerometer gyro magnetometer. It also says temperature, which technically would mean 10 DOF, but like, temperature is really easy to get. So, you know, we're looking at a nine DOF sensor, which means you get three degree magnetometer, three degree accelerometer, three degree gyro. When you're speccing nine DOF sensors, and you're almost always speccing nine DOF sensors because you want to do an orientation IMU type thing, there's basically like two kinds of systems chips that you want to use. First off, there's not, they're not like one, it's not one chip inside. It's actually going to be like two or three chips that are kind of tied together all on I squared C or with SPI. So in the LSM90S1, I don't remember exactly the two parts, but it's basically, I think it's like an LSM303 plus something else. It's basically either an accelerometer plus gyro and then a separate magnetometer, I think maybe say an LSM2 MDL or 3 MDL tied with an LSM330 or something. It's two chips inside and they're just packaged into one little chip, which is quite nice. It's nicely compact. These chips, they have things like filters and five-folds. However, they're going to give you raw accelerometer gyroscope and magnetometer data, and then you're sort of expected to take an AHRS fusion algorithm, you take that data and you combine, I think SPI probably even gives you libraries to combine that data to give you orientation in like quaternions or something. And there are also chips out there on the market like the B&O 055, B&O 085, and those chips are nine-dough sensors, but they also have a little fusion chip inside of them that does that calculation. So why would you care like which one you use? Well, first off, there's price. So if you're getting, you know, a B&O 055, well, now it's going to be about the same price as an LSM90S1. But in general, if you have a chip that's doing the fusion algorithm for you, you're going to pay a little bit more because there's this second chip that takes the sensor data and fuses it together to pipe out, you know, quaternion orientation data. There's a little microcontroller in there? Yeah, there's an illusion of Cortex-M0. I think the B&O 055 and 085, there's actually two different companies, although the partner number is very similar. One's Hillcrest, Siva, and one is something else I don't remember. And those have a SAMD21 actually inside also. So there's like actually like now three chips inside tied together. It's like our TI calculator that runs Python at a SAMD. They said a SAMD. So you can get, look, here's the thing, you can't get those chips right now anyways. But yeah, so they're going to be more expensive. The B&O's are also like totally unavailable. In fact, I think if you search on Digikey for the B&O, I think they're like, we don't even have a time in which these might be available. Yeah, like you can't even accept that. I've never seen that. There's not even an estimate. Wow. Which is really cool. Wow, due to temporary constrained supply, Digikey is unable to accept back orders at the time. Not only are there no back orders, but there's no time it's going to be back, no prices. We're just going to pretend this never happened. Yeah, basically, they don't even have the price. Again, they don't even know. They don't want to say, they never want anyone to say, hey, look, why did the price change? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know why they did it. I think that they really do not know when it's going to be. I wouldn't keep the price on it. I wouldn't put any time or date right now because everyone is trying. I think they're like, we don't even want to accept the order to carry the risk of like, what's going to happen? Who knows? Maybe this could be many years and they don't want to hold that order. It goes down. So those chips are, they're very specialty and those go faster. Also, sometimes you can get external chips that are like fusion chips and they'll do the work for you. But yes, the B&Ls are kind of famous for like, they do all the work for you and running this algorithm. Again, you can write, you can code the algorithm and we have a tutorial here on how to run AHS on a microcontroller, but you do have to have a microcontroller kind of constantly pulling data and you can't, you know, you can't miss any data, right? You have to be very consistent because you'll, you'll start to skew a little bit. You'll start to get y'all from, from missing data. So you have to be like, you know, every 50 hertz or whatever on the dot. You have to get the data. So if you can't get these, you know, again, you can always do it yourself by combining accelerometer, magnetometer and gyroscope. Of those, you want a pretty good magnetometer, but honestly, there's a lot of good magnetometers as long as it's got, you know, a good, you know, it's got range and it isn't affected too much by external magnetic fields. Magnetometer, I'm not too worried about. Magnetometer is what we're pretty good at. Accelerometer is also, we've really figured out MAM's accelerometers. Like everyone's got accelerometer now. We're pretty good at it. You know, you can use it to do tilt and motion. The part that's really going to dictate whether you get good sensor data out is going to be the gyroscope. The gyroscope is what has drift. You don't have drift in anything else. The gyroscope is the only thing that like it'll, it'll, it'll have offset that will add accumulate, accumulate error on your algorithm. And so we do have an article check out comparing gyroscope data sheets and, and you can look at some of the gyroscopes. NXP has really great gyroscopes as well. They, I think they've just continued them now. I mean, like it's, it's one of those things where it's like, here's a great great sensor, no longer available. Here's another great sensor, no longer available. But you can piece together, if you can't get one of these, you can piece together an accelerometer, gyroscope, those are usually sold in a set, you know, and then separately a magnetometer. They do not have to be from the same company. They can be separate companies, whatever, distributors, and then you convert them to SI units and then plug them into the AHRS algorithm to get orientation data. That said, let's look, you know, there's really only one option, but let's look at what we can get. Now, nothing's in stock, but I can show you what I would recommend. There's only one option. Is that technically an option or is that, how do you describe when there's one? It's not a choice. Maybe it is an option because the option is either bite or down. Yeah. So if you search for, for example, in stock IMU chips, which I think is anything with an Excel, at least one accelerometer and gyroscope, there's really slim pickings. And the prices are quite, quite high. I think just the demand is really high right now. But a lot of these are modules, and they get very expensive very quickly because they are, you know, you get into like these industrial IMUs. Like a car, I mean, like, you know, bill of material and cost of cars. I mean, these are used in robot, the problem is that they're used in like we's and like switch game controls, and they're used in like industrial robotics and automotive, right? These are sensors that are, they're so popular that everyone's competing because everyone wants this thing. In the beginning of the pandemic, no one was saying, hey, when this is, a year later, we're gonna have a chip shortage. Like that wasn't one of the things, you know, it was like quick stock up on toilet paper. Yeah. So, so let's not look at stuff in stock, because you know, we're going to be disappointed. However, let's look at surface mount components. And let's look at active. So at least, you know, when they do, you know, it will likely come back into stock. And then if you, if you're one of the, if you want something that's a more close size comparison to the LSM9DS1, you want nine axis. So let's pick, I don't know why it says gyroscope nine axis, but I'll click it anyways. But we definitely want gyro and magnetometer and accelerometer. So let's see what's available. And today you can see that the B&O 085, oh, these you could, at least maybe back order. Again, these are the ones that have the, the B&O 080 and 085, which are almost identical. There's one is a little bit, the one fixes a little bit of an SPI bug. Those are available. Then there's the, the LSM9DS1 that we refer to. And then after that, there's a lot of modules. So these are like, you can tell this is, it's not a true nine DOF sensor. It's like five sensors, you know, put together. It's like someone on my magnetometer gyroscope, put together on a board. But if you want it all in one, I would actually recommend going with the ICM 2948. This sensor also can do its own fusion algorithm inside. I believe it's under NDA, you might have a site NDA, or you might have to download a binary blob and then compile it in. But I'm not, I'm not 100% sure, but I know that InvenSense, which is now a TDK, they make very good nine DOF sensors. They were used in Nintendo and Apple products before Nintendo and Apple both, I think, changed over to ST, which means InvenSense got like half their business taken away. But it doesn't mean that they're not good sensors, they're very, very good sensors. They're just, you know, they didn't win in a gigantic fight between elephants, right? Which is, which is how it goes with your small company. Good news though is the price isn't bad, right? Like once you get to, you know, 100 pieces or 500 pieces, the price is down to $4, 450. So it's, it's much, much closer to what, where the LSM9DS1 was. You can actually get it at a price that's comparable. If you design the LSM9DS1 into something and you're like, I just need something that's about the same size, same functionality, iSquared C can give me nine DOF IMU data out whether or not you use this motion plus fusion thing. This would be a good alternative. It's not pin compatible and it's definitely not firmware compatible. But it's iSquared C and you give it some power. I think it might be 1.8 volt, but you know, maybe you could put a level shifter on there and I would recommend, I would recommend this chip. I use it, we have a breakout for it and it's quite easy to use and it's pretty reliable. You can use our libraries to get your design kick started as well. And while I don't know 100% that this is true, it does say that there's going to be at least a thousand in stock. Whoops. In September. If you, if you type in a quantity, says estimate September. So you have a shot of actually getting these. So that's, that's where we're at as engineers. Just praying. Hoping. Yeah. You know, I would have guessed that we'd run out of certain elements on the planet. Like, hey, we're out of lithium, everybody. We're going to have to deal with that. We're not, we're not there yet, but this, this is, this is reminding me of a, of all the futures that we're going to have. Yeah. Oh cool. Pandemic dystopia. What's the end result? Well, you're out of chips. All right. That's the great tip. All right. Check it out. The ice.