We have been busy here at Sleipnir Electronics in the last few months, so much so that we’ve neglected our blog for months! Today we decided that we should share with our customers more of what we are up to on a more regular basis, so we are going to write about one of the projects we have been working on in the last couple of weeks. Hopefully we will then start writing here more regularly about our other projects or news of the company.
Instrumentation amplifier
One of our projects has been designing the analogue frontend of a pressure sensor. The frontend interfaces with a piezo electric sense material. The sensor board consists of a microcontroller with analogue to digital converters (ADCs), a very high gain amplifier in three steps, power circuitry, communication circuitry, and support circuitry (protection, programming ports, crystals etc.). The firmware on the microcontroller was designed to include post processing through digital filtering and linearization, as well as interfacing with a host through the USB port. The device is powered through the USB port.
The final result will be capable of detecting a pressure difference that correlates to a ~0.239N force onto the surface, over a range of 0-~980N. The range stems from the usage of a 12bit ADC (4096 values). With oversampling and the digital filtering, the output value is very stable, and it is precise to within half the least significant bit (LSB) after calibrating.
Any comments or questions are welcome! Until next time.
Atli
Comments