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Question about ADXL375 noise

Thread Summary

The user is experiencing higher than expected noise levels on an ADXL375 Eval board connected to an Adafruit M0 processor board via SPI at 4 MHz. For 3200 ODR, the noise is around ±1G, possibly due to power supply issues or incorrect multibyte reads. For 100 ODR, the noise is ±0.1G, which could be due to power supply, device mounting, or incorrect noise calculation methods. The final answer suggests investigating power supply stability, ensuring multibyte reads, and using RMS calculations for noise.
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I have and ADXL375 Eval board connected to a Adafruit M0 processor board.  I am currently using SPI communication with a speed of 4MHz.  I see noise on the accel around +/- 1G at 3200 ODR and +/- .1G at 100 ODR.  The spec suggests this should be .28G and .05G respectively (sqrt3200*.005, sqrt100*.005).  What could be the possible causes of the extra noise I am seeing?  could a varying input voltage cause this?

3200 ODR:


100 ODR:

Edit Notes


[locked by: NevadaMark at 7:56 PM (GMT -4) on 13 Aug 2018]
[unlocked by: NevadaMark at 7:56 PM (GMT -4) on 13 Aug 2018]
  • Hi,

    I have a 2 part answer, 1 for the 3200 Hz case and the other for the 100 Hz ODR.

    For the 3200 Hz ODR data:

    The noise in the plots appears to be dictated by large magnitude spikes. Assuming the sensor is mounted to a stable surface, I would suggest you investigate 2 possible causes.  1. Power supply and 2. SPI communication.

    Noise from the power supply can couple and affect the output noise.

    Otherwise, the jumps in the data may be due to reading an MSB register for a previous sample while reading the LSB of the current sample. Are multibyte reads being done or are you using single byte reads?  Multibyte is better.  Are you left or right justified?  If you are left justified, the lower bits in the LSB register would correspond to about 1.5g steps if a transition is happening occasionally.  For example, if the previous data point has the lower bits of 1 0000 and the next sample is 0 1111.  These are only 1 bit different, but if a mis-read occurs, this could be read as 1 1111, which is about 1.5 g higher than either real reading.

    For the 100 Hz ODR:

    I would suggest power supply, device mounting or calculation method.  The data appears to be within +/-1lsb which would be 100 mg peak to peak.  Are you stating peak to peak noise or rms noise.  You should use rms calculations for noise.