Qt Embedded 4.6.0 + Qwt + kxps5 accelerometer!
After testing the operation of the kxps5 accelerometer with i2c-tools i wrote a test application using the i2c-dev interface. If you want to test your code before you write a kernel driver this is definately a good place to start. Once i had the configuration registers set properly and i had a routine for reading the acceleration vectors I stripped down a ds1621 kernel driver to a bare minimum, and then built it back up again to work with the kxps5. I then bitbaked the kxps5 driver as a kernel module, along with hwmon and it works perfectly! :) Next i cross compiled qwt 5.2.0 and plotted the acceleration as function of time. The video below is taken with antialiased lines which slows down the refresh rate but makes them look nice. If you plot it without this enabled it runs very smoothly. Here you see the kxps5 running without an external low pass filter (the internal filter is 1kHz) and despite this the output is pretty stable. What impressed me the most is the sensitivity. When placed on a desk the free fall interrupt indicator lights up if you drop one of the little nuts from the friendlyarm LCD about 10cm away from the device!
The kernel driver for this is now available here.
New hardware!
After breaking the z-axis connection on my first device I ordered a new KXPS5 accelerometer from crodnet on ebay. I really recommend this seller, he's very cheap and sends things rapidly.
I quickly knocked together a circuit on veroboard and hooked up the base of a transistor to the freefall / motion interrupt pin to check it was working. It is remarkably sensitive, the LED flicks on if i drop my pen at one end of my desk when the device is at the other! I was quite pleased that everything was working well so i hooked it up to the I2C bus using the cable kit kindly supplied by www.andahammer.com. Using I2C tools i was able to set registers and read acceleration vectors without any trouble so i'm pretty sure everything is working well. I was a bit worried about exceeding the bus capacitance at first.
It turns out that i can still use the old device if i rely on the internal low pass filter. I was thinking of doing this anyway and using a Kalman filter to process the output. First i need to write a device driver so i've rapidly being trying to learn C. So far i've got a very basic kernel module up and running on the mini2440 :)