Smart sensor dev kit handles 12DoF and saves on power
15-03-2016 | By Paul Whytock
What is claimed as the world’s lowest power and smallest twelve degrees-of-freedom (DoF) wireless smart sensor dev kit for connectivity applications has been developed by power management specialists Dialogue Semiconductor. It can output real world orientation of a device in quaternion form.
Quaternions provide a mathematical method of demonstrating orientations and rotations of objects in three dimensions and are used in computer graphics, computer vision, robotics and navigation systems. When they are applied to show rotations relative to a reference coordinate they are often referred to as orientation quaternions.
The company says its DA14583 SmartBond Bluetooth Smart SoC is combined with Bosch Sensortec’s gyroscope, accelerometer, magnetometer and environmental sensors on a PCB measuring 16 x 15mm printed circuit board. Current consumption is quoted as 1.3mA when streaming sensor data, and less than 110µA in advertising mode and under 11µA in power-save mode.
The software dev kit includes SmartFusion and also the company's smart sensor library for data acquisition, auto-calibration and sensor data fusion. It runs on the DA14583’s embedded Cortex M0 processor.
An operational advantage for SmartFusion is it does not depend on external runtime libraries and includes options for both static and auto-calibration and on the fly selection of sensor input for data. The kit includes iOS and Android apps for data visualisation on smart phones and tablets.
The DA14583 uses an ARM Cortex-M0 baseband processor with an integral ultra-low power Bluetooth Smart radio. It can be used as a standalone application processor or as a data pump in hosted systems and has a flexible memory architecture, including 1Mbit of Flash memory.
The Bosch sensors featured in the development kit are the BMI160 6-axis inertial measurement unit, the BMM150 3-axis geomagnetic field sensor and the BME280 integrated environmental unit.
