Expansion board speeds industrial MEMS prototyping on STM32 Nucleo
Combining five industrial sensors and external sensor support, the STMicroelectronics X-NUCLEO-IKS5A1 evaluation board shortens development of motion and environmental sensing platforms.
The X-NUCLEO-IKS5A1 is an STM32 Nucleo expansion board which brings together motion and environmental sensing on one industrial platform. By combining five onboard MEMS sensors, the board gives engineers a faster route to evaluating sensor fusion, condition monitoring, and industrial sensing concepts without first building custom hardware.
The sensing set on the X-NUCLEO-IKS5A1 includes the ISM6HG256X intelligent inertial measurement unit (IMU), with simultaneous low-g and high-g acceleration detection, the ISM330IS 6-axis IMU, the IIS2DULPX 3-axis accelerometer, the ILPS22QS barometer, and the IIS2MDC 3-axis magnetometer. This combination allows developers to assess both motion and environmental data on the same board, and explore advanced embedded functions such as finite state machine, machine learning core, intelligent sensor processing unit, and sensor hub operation.
To make the platform more useful in real industrial set-ups, the X-NUCLEO-IKS5A1 supports external sensors through a DIL24 adapter, ribbon flat cable, or flex PCB connection. The main board X-NUCLEO-IND5A1 hosts the motion MEMS and environmental sensors, and the detachable STEVAL-MKGI07A add-on board provides two industrial connectors, allowing remote sensor placement when the measurement point is not close to the host board.
Software support is broad. The X-NUCLEO-IKS5A1 is supported by the ST Edge AI Suite with tools, including MEMS Studio, X-CUBE-MEMS1, HSDatalog, and the wider STM32Cube ecosystem, and sample implementations are available for NUCLEO-F401RE, NUCLEO-L152RE, NUCLEO-L073RZ, and NUCLEO-U575ZI-Q boards. This helps to shorten the path from first evaluation to application firmware.