Introducing the Freerunner Navigation Board

[Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller]

Am 02.05.2010 um 16:09 schrieb Kosa:

> Christoph Mair escribió:
>> Dear community,
>>
>> we are proud to release a hardware extension for our beloved  
>> Freerunner: a
>> navigation board!
>
> That's amazing! Great work! would you mind to share why did you
> developed  it? I know it will help and will be used by several  
> project,
> but what's yours?
>
> As you also developed this
> http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/I2C_Pressure_Sensor I certanly think the
> Neo is going somewhere in the outer space :p

Good idea! "free running" into space. Talking to aliens certainly  
needs open source hard- and software since they have to understand the  
protocols first :)

But seriously, one Freerunner did go to (inner) space on a research  
rocket (altitude was approx. 100 km):

http://freeyourphone.de/portal_v1/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=1430&p=14569&hilit=dlr#p14569

I don't know exactly why Christoph & Michele developed this, but I can  
imagine some areas (who finds other ones?) what that these sensors  
could be used for. You develop new user interfaces (3D gaming :) and  
generally improve portable navigation.

For car navigation, GPS is in most cases sufficient since a car goes  
fast enough so that GPS can tell about the direction of movement. But  
if you have a handheld device, only a compass and/or gyroscope can  
tell that you are rotating the device. While the LIS302 accelerometers  
can detect that you shake the device. This gives several new inputs  
for gesture recognition. The arena is open for creativity...

And, I think one can use the pressure sensor either as a weather  
station (during hiking or skiing) - or to get the altitude and detect  
ascent/descent better than with GPS. I think all these fine things can  
augment and integrate with the GPS system.

Nikolaus