Getting Started

Thank you for purchasing the Pulse-40 a miniature and high performance Inertial Measurement Unit!

This tutorial will guide you in the first steps using your new Pulse-40 starter kit, where to find available software and manuals, and how to perform the initial connection.

1. Content of a Starter Kit

The starter kit contains everything you need to start testing your Pulse-40 in minutes. It is composed of the following elements:

A Pulse-40 IMU
An evaluation board
A USB cable to connect the starter kit on your PC

2. First steps using Inertial SDK and sbgCenter

The sbgCenter is the fastest and easiest way to start evaluating your Pulse-40 for Windows platform.

You can easily download the latest Inertial SDK here.

Installing Inertial SDK

To install the Inertial SDK, execute the downloaded file and a wizard will guide you through steps.

The Wizard informs you when the installation is completed, and gives you the choice to launch directly the sbgCenter software.

3. Hardware Connection

Once the SDK is installed, you can plug the Pulse-40 on the Starter Kit demo board and use the USB cable to connect it to your PC.

You can then check the LED to ensure that HW connection is established:

PWR LED (Green) is ON, the power supply is available,
EN LED (RED) is ON.

By default, the Pulse-40 will send continuously data when it is powered on.

Note: RX and TX LEDs on the demo board monitor the USB link with the computer.

Note: You can find here more information about the starter kit specifications.

4. Use the Pulse-40 with the sbgCenter

Opening sbgCenter

Double-click the sbgCenter icon on your desktop .

Click on the icon . A window will appear to list the attached devices.

Then press the Refresh button.

If this is the first time that you connect a Pulse-40 to your computer, the sbgCenter will ask you to change the FTDI USB serial converter configuration. Click “Yes Please” to ensure proper operation and then click "Refresh" again to update the device list.

Your Pulse-40 should now be listed in the list of detected devices. Click the “Connect” button to start using the sensor or simply double-click on the selected line.

Now the sbgCenter gives you several useful features:

Access easily to Pulse-40 device information such as firmware version, serial number, communication port, baudrate
Display and record sensor data using nice graphs.
Display sensor status
Record sensor data and store your project in a .sbg file
Export your acquisitions into text files using your own format.

Depending on your computer's internal memory, the sbgCenter might not be suitable for very long datalogging sessions at highest output data rate (ODR).

If you plan to setup long acquisitions, we recommend you to use the command line tools or the sbgDataLogger tool GUI also present in the Inertial SDK.

5. Logging data using command line tools

SBG Systems provides a powerful Command Line tool, the sbgBasicLogger. The tool is perfect to display sensor data in a console and log all measurements to a CSV like text file. Decimation using moving average filters can also be applied to reduce the amount of logged data.

The sbgBasicLogger is available on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X platforms and can be downloaded directly on the sbgECom GitHub page.

The example below, read data from a Pulse40 connected on the serial COM4 at a baudrate of 921600 bps. The IMU data is displayed on the console at 10Hz whereas all data are stored at 200Hz in a text file located in the user Documents directory.

D:\sbgECom\bin\tools\sbgBasicLogger>sbgBasicLogger.exe -s COM4 -r 921600 --print-logs --console-decimation 20 --write-logs --dir D:\Data
IMU_SHORT: 1064205000 1023 -0.010788345337 -0.074179410934 -9.807014608383 -0.071368134373 0.045277878961 -0.016090858467 31.620
IMU_SHORT: 1064305000 1023 -0.011177206039 -0.072029542923 -9.806835651398 -0.057441335967 0.053723237115 -0.018931491455 31.614
IMU_SHORT: 1064405000 1023 -0.014346361160 -0.074629211426 -9.808124113083 -0.054651673266 0.053299082367 -0.016969519616 31.614
...

To stop the logging session, just close the command line window.

Simply type sbgBasicLogger.exe --help to get all command line settings and options.

Avoid printing IMU data at rate higher than 100 Hz in the console otherwise the logger could hang leading to gaps in recorded data.

6. First device configuration using command line tools

It is possible to configure the Pulse-40 with the Configuration API (sbgInsRestApi). A simple way to use this API on a Windows/Linux/Mac OS X computer is to use the command line tool sbgEcomApi.exe, provided in the SDK or on GitHub.

Please visit the How-to section to get step-by-step guides to configure the Pulse-40 IMU. You can also read the Pulse-40 User Manual to get more details.

Before going on with the following steps, you need to identify the Pulse-40 COM Port and baudrate. This can be easily done with the sbgCenter.

Getting Pulse-40 device information

Simply open a Command prompt in the sbgECom Api directory and type the following command

In our example, the Pulse-40 is connected on COM12 with 921600bps.

sbgEComApi.exe -s COM12 -r 921600 /api/v1/info -g

You should get the following response:

{"productCode":"PULSE40-43T-00","deviceId":35116,"hwRevision":"1.0.0.0","btVersion":"1.9.129-stable","fmwVersion":"1.0.16730-dev"}

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The IMU answer gives you information on your product and confirms that you are communicating with the right serial port at right baudrate.

IMU configuration

In the following example, the "imuShort" is configured for a 10Hz output rate.

sbgEComApi.exe -s COM12 -r 921600 /api/v1/settings/output/comA/messages/imuShort -p -b \"100ms\"

The device answer is:

{"title":"request successful","needReboot":false}

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As you can see in the response, you do need to reboot the IMU to have the configuration effective.

Saving settings

By default, new settings are only applied in volatile memory. In order to save configuration for future use, you need to use a specific settings save command:

sbgEComApi.exe -s <COM> -r <baudrate> /api/v1/settings/save -p

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