L3GD20 and Gimball Lock?

[DLewi]

I’m trying to use the L3GD20 gyro to compute angular position from the angular velocity measurements returned from the gyro. Most of the time, everything works as expected. However, if I move the gyro in two directions (roll and pitch) at the same time, the measurements suddenly are way off.

I ran across a posting on the Internet that said I should be representing angular position using quarternions rather than Euler angles because the latter is subject to something called gimball lock. I’ve never heard of this before, and wondered if it really does apply to MEMS gyro chips like the L3GD20.