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MultiNav Pro+ sensors module - temp readings seem high, self-heating issue?

Amy SmithJune 13, 2026
Been working with the sensors module for a few weeks now and I'm getting temperature readings that seem consistently higher than ambient - like 3 to 5°C above what my reference thermometer shows. At first I thought it was calibration offset stuff but it's pretty repeatable across different environments. My gut says the sensor is picking up heat from the board itself, especially when the module is doing a lot of sensor polling at higher rates. Has anyone else run into this or is there something in the config I should be looking at to compensate?
 
I'm currently polling all sensors at a pretty aggressive rate because I need the accel and gyro data for my application, and I wonder if that sustained activity is just generating enough heat on-die to skew the temp sensor. I've seen this kind of thing on other IMU+environment combo chips where the thermal design is kind of an afterthought. Would slowing down the polling on the environmental sensors specifically while keeping the motion sensors fast actually help, or are they all tied to the same duty cycle internally?
 
Also curious if RFOXiA has any published calibration coefficients or correction curves for the temp sensor relative to different load conditions. Even a simple offset table based on polling rate or supply current would be super useful. If anyone has worked around this already I'd love to know what approach actually stuck - whether thats software correction, physically isolating the module, or something else entirely.
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AdamJune 13, 2026
@Amy Smith yeah this is a real thing and your diagnosis is pretty much spot on — self-heating from sustained IMU polling is a well-known issue on combo sensor chips, and a 3-5°C offset under heavy load is honestly within the range I'd expect when you're hammering the accel/gyro continuously.
 
The good news is that decoupling the environmental sensor polling rate from the motion sensor polling rate does help in practice, even if they share a common power rail. The thermal contribution isn't just about the clock cycle — it's cumulative heat from sustained current draw, so if you can drop the temp/humidity/pressure sample rate way down (like once every few seconds is usually plenty for environmental data anyway) while keeping your IMU fast, you'll reduce the average power dissipation on the die and the offset will shrink. Whether you can fully separate the duty cycles in firmware depends on how the module is configured, but it's worth trying before going down the software correction path.
 
For a software correction approach in the meantime, the simplest thing that actually works is characterizing the offset empirically at a few different polling rates — run a steady-state test, let thermals stabilize, note the delta versus your reference, and build a lookup table keyed on your IMU ODR or approximate current draw. It's not elegant but it's reliable and takes maybe an hour to generate the data. On published calibration coefficients from RFOXiA specifically — I'm not aware of anything formal being out there yet, but honestly tagging Moamen directly in this thread or posting in the Dev Hub resources section would be the right move, because if there's demand for an offset table it's the kind of thing that could end up in the documentation.
 
Physically isolating the module is a last resort in my opinion — it works but adds mechanical complexity and most people solve it sufficiently in firmware first.

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