 | | Sensing with Autonomous Mobile Robots
| Autonomous mobile robots rely on sensors to navigate through their environment. | | | Keeping Cool
| | If you've ever worked while resting a laptop computer on your lap, you know that computers emit heat, and the more powerful the computer, the greater the heat produced. This is a problem because electronics really don't enjoy elevated temperatures. A hot computer is a slow computer or, worse, a computer that will cease functioning. | | | Wireless's Domestic Turf War
| | Three major wireless communications protocol rivals have made new moves in home automation , while energy-harvesting pioneer pursues its own path to the building market. | |  MORE ARTICLES
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| Getting into Pockets and Purses
| | Add one more to the list of challenges faced by consumer GPS-enabled devices: the human hand that holds them. Body loading significantly degrades receiver sensitivity. A dielectrically loaded quadrifilar helix antenna can ameliorate this condition. | | |
Steep-Slope Monitoring
| | Although GPS is an efficient tool for deformation monitoring, it also is an expensive one for large projects. The authors developed a remote-controlled monitoring system using an electronic switching device for multiple antennas to monitor steep slopes at the Xiaowan hydropower station in China. | | | MORE ARTICLES
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| Safe Boating, Everyone!
| | The cry of "man overboard!" is second only to "fire on shipboard!" as a general alarm for all hands. But what if no one sees that fellow boater or shipmate (or pet) fall into the drink? The Raymarine (www.raymarine.com) LifeTag system, using Ember's ZigBee (www.zigbee.org) networking technology, does away with that unhappy scenario. | | | MORE ARTICLES
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| Keeping Cool
| | If you've ever worked while resting a laptop computer on your lap, you know that computers emit heat, and the more powerful the computer, the greater the heat produced. This is a problem because electronics really don't enjoy elevated temperatures. A hot computer is a slow computer or, worse, a computer that will cease functioning. | | | Safety and Security Soar, Machine Vision Enters Automotive On Ramp
| | Arecent study by TRW Automotive Inc. reports that 74% of respondents say vehicle safety features and options are more important to them than they were five years ago. And all of the entries on Edmunds.com's Top 10 High-Tech Car Safety Technologies—which the automotive information source recommends consumers look for when car shopping—are sensor based. Most are self-explanatory: | | | Materials Innovations May Challenge Noncontact-Sensor Growth
| | The development of "active," noncontact sensors based on Hall effect, magnetoresistive, and variable-reluctance transformer technologies is penetrating the established market of "passive," contact sensors—and increasingly taking market share for automotive speed and position applications, says market research firm Strategy Analytics. "This is being driven by the need for improved reliability as well as increased functionality and accuracy," notes senior analyst Simon Schofield. | | | Enabling 3D Vision
| | High-end machine vision applications are progressing from 2D to 3D
imaging with techniques such as laser triangulation and
stereovision, say analysts at Frost & Sullivan. | | | MORE ARTICLES
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| Expand Your Gaming Space with Sensors
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| Proximity sensors and accelerometers are changing the gaming experience as we know it today. While these technologies are not new, improvements in user acceptance, size, performance, and price are spurring their use in the gaming market. | | | Is That Meat Okay to Eat?
| | There's yet another food spoilage detector that can detect high levels of bacterial activity in poultry and other meats destined for the table. SensorfreshQ sniffs out biogenic amines that can be picked up by a handheld device that passes an air sample over the item of interest. | | | And Check the Silverware Too
| | At Cornell University, researchers are working on a new table napkin made of nanofibers that can advise of the presence of microorganisms you don't want to ingest. | | | A Touch of Genius
| | FingerTPS, a line of capacitive tactile pressure sensors mounted on stretchable fabric designed to be worn on a person's fingertips and palm, can measure the pressures exerted while the person uses a tool or performs some other action. | | | Playing the E-Field: Capacitance Sensors in Action
| | When Michael Faraday introduced the concept of an electric field, little did he realize how far science would run with the idea. Today, engineers are using electric fields to sense the presence of other objects without relying on physical contact. Referred to as e-field sensors or capacitance sensors, they are becoming more and more prevalent in a wide range of inexpensive and long-lasting applications. When you take a closer look at how they work, you quickly see why their popularity is growing.
| | | Apple and Nike Instrument Workouts
| | Nike's new shoes incorporate sensors that communicate with Apple's iPod to display time, distance, and pace, as well as calories burned. Runners can review workout stats by run, or by week or month. | | | Magic Spectacles
| | One problem with every type of eyeglasses, contact lenses, and even the plastic lenses implanted after cataract removal is that they all have a fixed focal length. Auto-focus cameras don't, but they operate on a principle that wouldn't work for a pair of spectacles. Until now. | | | LBS Incorporates Sensors
| | Cell phone providers promote location-based services (LBS) as a way to send custom messages to subscribers based on their location—as reported by GPS or radiolocation and triangulation. Now LBSs are beginning to incorporate sensors. | | | Automotive Propels Consumer Sensors
| | The silicon micromachined inertial sensor that deploys your
automotive airbags can't simply be dropped into your laptop for
free-fall detection without some do-differentlys. The differences
go well beyond the application spaces of medium/high-g and low-g
that automotive sockets sport. In fact, the automotive and consumer
markets present conflicting fundamental demands. Building a bridge
between them means giving reconsideration to design, test, space,
quality, time-to-market, front- and back-end assembly—and
price. | | | MORE ARTICLES
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| Just Add Parts and Shake . . .
| | This column usually focuses on prosaic and proven applications for circuits and sensors. This month, though, I am going to talk about an emerging field called evolvable hardware, which potentially has tremendous applicability to designing robust sensing and control systems. | | | Signal Amplification
| | With the recent introduction of cheap ?? analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) offering resolutions of 24 bits or more, you'd think that the digital revolution is complete, and that the need for analog design has passed. Twenty-four bits gives you a resolution of better than 1 ?V on a 10 V span, so these high-resolution converters will make it easy to solve many interfacing problems with a minimum of additional circuitry. | | | The Five-Minute Filter University—August Session
| | Last month we discussed a number of simple passive filters in both low-pass and high-pass configurations. Although these filters could reject out-of-band signals, this capability was relatively limited because they all had an attenuation roll-off rate of –20 dB/decade. You will find that many applications require a much greater ability to reject out-of-band signals than that provided by the passive low-pass filters we looked at. | | | The Five-Minute Filter University, July Session
| | Back in the late 1970s comedian Don Novello (a.k.a. Father Guido Sarducci) had a routine called the "Five-Minute University," which was supposed to impart to you, in the span of only five minutes, all the knowledge you would retain five years after graduating from a regular university. So, in the same spirit, I offer "Dr. Ed's Five-Minute Analog Filter Design University." | | | MORE ARTICLES
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| Moving SOA onto the Plant Floor
| | If the sensor manufacturers' products already have the software "hooks" that allow the sensor data to be accessed by the SOA, the implementation has a quicker ROI. | | | MES—A Work In Progress
| | Traditionally, a manufacturing execution system (MES) is defined as a production scheduling and tracking system, which schedules and updates orders, analyzes and reports resource availability, collects execution data—such as material and labor usage, process parameters, and order and equipment status—and maintains statistical quality control. But such a static definition doesn't do this genre of software justice because MESs are a work in progress. | | | OPC—A Question of Relevance
| | For ten years, OPC's suite of standards has provided the industrial automation world with open connectivity, but the technology on which its standards are based is no longer on the cutting edge of data sharing. The foundation that rescued manufacturers, systems integrators, and software providers from the chaos of proprietary communications interfaces now has to compete with fast movers such as service-oriented architectures and Web services. The question is: Can the standards evolve, embrace new communications mechanisms, and remain relevant? | | | MORE ARTICLES
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| Integrating PID Controllers into Automated Processes via Ethernet
| | Ethernet powers our home and office networks and it is increasingly being used to automate control processes on the plant floor. Here's why. | | | Analyzing Gas Samples with Laser-Based Spectroscopy
| | Continuous-wave cavity ring-down spectroscopy uses the behavior of laser light passed through a gas sample to provide fast and accurate measurements of contaminants down to parts per trillion (ppt) levels. | | | Market Prospects for Position Sensors
| | The proportion of industry sales varies widely among sensing technologies, with proximity sensors taking the largest market share. While the smallest share belongs to linear displacement devices, this category is forecast to experience the highest growth. | | | Temperature Sensor Tips and Tricks
| | When you're adding temperature sensors to a PCB, correct placement can make all the difference. Here are some tips and tricks to place your sensors effectively. | | | MEMS in Automotive and Consumer Electronics
| | The automotive and consumer electronics industries are increasingly adopting MEMS-based sensors. Here's a brief analysis of where and how these sensors are used and how we predict the market will behave over the next five years. | | Embedding Networking into Low-Cost
Sensors and I/O
| | Embedding networking into low-cost sensors presents particular cost and complexity challenges. Pyxos is an embedded control networking platform with tiny ICs that is designed to be built into low-cost sensors and actuators. | | | The Best of Sensors Expo 2007
| | Clever sensors, beefed-up wireless sensor networks, and smart armor: just a few of the winners of the 2007 Best of Sensors Expo Awards. | | | The ΔΣ ADC Learns New Tricks
| | A new architecture is blurring the distinction between successive approximation register (SAR) and ΔΣ ADCs, creating devices that couple high resolution with high throughput, achieving exceptional measurement accuracy and ease of integration. | | | Powering Tire Pressure Sensors
| | In the interest of improved safety (and better gas mileage), tire pressure monitoring systems will soon be mandatory on cars. The challenge is how to power them. | | | MORE ARTICLES
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| Special Report
| | It's hard to overestimate the impact of MEMS—or LabVIEW—on sensor applications. | | | So Much More
| | The Today at Sensors weblog (www.sensorsmag.com) not only gave us Sensors editors an outlet to report daily from Sensors Expo (June 5–7, www.sensorsexpo.com), but also it lets us tell you more about Expo happenings—among other things—than we've been able to before. Thank goodness, because there's much to tell! | | | MORE ARTICLES
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| Integrating PID Controllers into Automated Processes via Ethernet
| | Ethernet powers our home and office networks and it is increasingly being used to automate control processes on the plant floor. Here's why. | | | Pressure-Resistant Proxes: New Generation Proximity Switches For Hydraulic Applications
| | A new generation of inductive proximity sensors are engineered to withstand the high pressures now common in fluid power applications. | | | Pick the Right Camera Interface
| | Perhaps Camera Link's biggest advantage is blazing speed—up to 3.6 Gbps. Another is deterministic communication back to the camera electronics that allows on-the-fly control of camera functions such as frame rate, zoom, etc. | | | Software Enables Manufacturing Integration
| | UGS Corp. says its Tecnomatix Production Management portfolio, a family of manufacturing shop-floor applications, is the first software to integrate production management with overall product lifecycle management (PLM) process. | | | Moving SOA onto the Plant Floor
| | If the sensor manufacturers' products already have the software "hooks" that allow the sensor data to be accessed by the SOA, the implementation has a quicker ROI. | | | A Machine That Watches
| | During an automated manufacturing process, the product typically moves along a production line at either constant or variable speeds. The first task of optoelectronic inspection is to discard that motion. For example, machine vision systems use triggers and shutters and photoelectric sensors use gates to freeze the object at a particular point in time so that it can be analyzed. | | | Playing the E-Field: Capacitance Sensors in Action
| | When Michael Faraday introduced the concept of an electric field, little did he realize how far science would run with the idea. Today, engineers are using electric fields to sense the presence of other objects without relying on physical contact. Referred to as e-field sensors or capacitance sensors, they are becoming more and more prevalent in a wide range of inexpensive and long-lasting applications. When you take a closer look at how they work, you quickly see why their popularity is growing. | | | New To Bookshelves—Sensor Selection Guide: Optimizing Manufacturing and Processes, 2nd ed.
| | ISA publishes Independent Learning Modules (ILMs), materials designed primarily for independent self-study. This book is one of these ILMs and is intended to provide a broad understanding of sensors (in terms of what you need to measure and what devices exist to do so) coupled with information on how to choose wisely. | | | Vision Sensors See More Details
| | For decades, photoelectric sensors have been ubiquitous on packaging lines—triggering processes, counting, checking for label presence, sorting objects of different sizes, and performing dozens of other tasks. Even so, their usefulness has been limited by their single beam and lack of brain power. That's where low-cost vision sensors can help. Vision sensors are especially well suited to applications that are too complicated for photoelectrics or that require complex fixturing. | | | MORE ARTICLES
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| Help for Hide and Heart
| | Part of the misery of being diabetic is having to prick your finger or arm for glucose-level testing. And haste prevents waste when it comes to diagnosing a heart attack. Sandia researchers led by Jeb Flemming are developing diagnostic toolsElectroNeedles and ?Poststhat could benefit both diabetics and heart patients. Other members of the research team include Sandia's David Ingersoll and Carrie Schmidt, and Colin Buckley, a medical student at the University of New Mexico Medical School. | | | MORE ARTICLES
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| Mel's Picks
| | Online Vision Tutorial; Job Search Site; Personalized Ringtones | | | Mel's Picks
| | I've mentioned Sensorland.com, a Web site for information on sensing and measurement, before in this column. The people behind Sensorland.com have now added Sensorwatch to the main site. This is a series of internal Web sites, each devoted to a particular type of sensor. Currently, there are sites for pressure, position/proximity, vibration, load/force, and instrumentation. Look here for lists of suppliers, new product updates, and other relevant information. | | | MORE ARTICLES
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| Just Add Parts and Shake . . .
| | This column usually focuses on prosaic and proven applications for circuits and sensors. This month, though, I am going to talk about an emerging field called evolvable hardware, which potentially has tremendous applicability to designing robust sensing and control systems. | | | Zzzzappp!
| | When someone with a static charge buildup touches an electronic device the damages to the IC are not difficult to detect. It's the secondary ESD effects that are hard to troubleshoot because they might not hit the IC. | | |
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