Heading Computation Using Magnetometer, Inertial Sensors and Bluetooth Communication

The paper presents the required steps to implement the heading computation using the magnetometer and inertial sensors that are available on the CC2650 Sensor Tag. This device is powered by a coin battery and can communicate with a PC or smartphone by Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology. A MATLAB application is implemented on the PC that receives data from CC2650 Sensor Tag and performs the computations to obtain the heading and display it in real-time. The first step is to calibrate the magnetometer. Then the heading is computed. In order to improve the performance, a fusion with the gyroscope data using the Kalman filter is performed. The 3D orientation of CC2650 Sensor Tag is also computed using data from all the sensors and the new functions introduced in MATLAB. Theoretical background and experimental results are presented.