Sensors
Most of the products and devices designed and developed by Edenprime include multiple sensors, including individual analogue components, digital devices and more substantial modules. The output samples from these devices may be analogue requiring sampling using ADCs, others provide data samples via digital interfaces such as I2C, SPI, UART.
The sampled data will often require processing, typically either simple filtering or more complex algorithmic or statistical processing, with the results indicated, stored or reported by some communications channel, either regularly or when defined thresholds are exceeded (an “event” or “alarm”).
Determining the optimum way to use the sensors in order to create a system providing the level of performance required but at minimum power consumption or cost is often key to the initial design work. This may involve determining whether it is more efficient to completely remove power from the sensors between measurements, versus measurement settling-times, as well as use of sleep modes etc. In particular, for IoT-type applications where the unit is operating from batteries and/or using energy-harvesting methods, and where wireless communications are to be used, these trade-offs are crucial to a successful manufacturable product design.
Edenprime has broad experience across many sensor types, their control and use, sampling, algorithmic processing and integration into coherent low-power designs:
- gas sensors (presence, concentration, characteristics)
- temperature and humidity sensors
- seismic sensors (for ground movement; detection of nearby people, vehicles or animals)
- accelerometers and gyros (for position and movement analysis)
- microphone (speech, other sound detection/recognition)
- voltage/current (typically using ADCs, for wide range of voltage or signal monitoring)