Adafruit Feather M0 and MSA301 accelerometer circuitpython example

In this article we look at an accelerometer – this time its the MSA301 and we will connect this to an Adafruit Feather M0 running Circuitpython

Lets look at some information regarding the sensor, this is from the datasheet

MSA301 is a triaxial, low-g accelerometer with I2C digital output for consumer applications.

It has dynamical user selectable full scales range of ±2g/±4g/±8g/±16g and allows acceleration measurements with output data rates from 1Hz to 500Hz

FEATURES

User selectable range, ±2g, ±4g, ±8g, ±16g
1.62V to 3.6V supply voltage,
1.2V to 3.6V IO supply voltage
User selectable data output rate
I2C Interface
One interrupt pin
14 bits resolution

Parts Required

Name	Link
Adafruit Feather M0 Express	Adafruit (PID 3403) Feather M0 Express – Designed for CircuitPython – ATSAMD21 Cortex M0
MSA-301	PIM456 Acceleration Sensor Development Tools MSA301 3DoF Motion Sensor Breakout
Connecting cables	Free shipping Dupont line 120pcs 20cm male to male + male to female and female to female jumper wire

Schematic/Connection

feather and msa301 layout

Code Example(s)

I used Mu for development

The following is based on a library , I copied the adafruit_msa301 library for this device to the lib folder on my Feather M0 Express – https://circuitpython.org/libraries

This is the basic example which comes with the library for tap detection

Example 1

You may have to play about with the time.sleep(0.05) value, the original value was 0.01 but it seemed to be picking up multiple taps

[codesyntax lang=”python”]

import time
import board
import busio
import adafruit_msa301
 
i2c = busio.I2C(board.SCL, board.SDA)
 
msa = adafruit_msa301.MSA301(i2c)
 
msa.enable_tap_detection()
 
while True:
    if msa.tapped:
        print("Single Tap!")
    time.sleep(0.05)

[/codesyntax]

Here is what I saw in Mu REPL window

Auto-reload is on. Simply save files over USB to run them or enter REPL to disable.
main.py output:
Single Tap!
Single Tap!
Single Tap!

Example 2

This is a simple accelerometer example

[codesyntax lang=”python”]

import time
import board
import busio
import adafruit_msa301
 
i2c = busio.I2C(board.SCL, board.SDA)
 
msa = adafruit_msa301.MSA301(i2c)
while True:
    print("%f %f %f" % msa.acceleration)
    time.sleep(0.5)

[/codesyntax]

Here is what I saw in Mu REPL window

main.py output:
-3.758647 1.862565 6.937935
-3.744283 1.876929 6.990604
-3.744283 1.872141 6.928360
-5.898922 1.220962 10.567303
-1.570492 -3.160136 4.744993

Links