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Magnetometers and MEMS
Magnetometers One of the earliest sensors that humans made to aid us as we navigated the world, was the compass. Long before the accelerometer, the gieger counter, or the frog leg oscilloscope, nearly one thousand years ago inventors in China noticed that a lodestone (a natural magnet) would align itself in a consistent direction if…
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Resisting the Heat
Resistance-Temperature Sensors, RTDs and Thermistors I was at an event recently and one of the topics was sensor basics, brilliant, right in my wheelhouse. The presenter started a section on thermo-couples by discussing the range of sensor types available and listed both RTDs (Resistance Temperature Detectors) and Thermistors (Thermal-resistors) as competing sensor types to Thermo-couples…
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Digital Voltmeters – The Fundamental Device for Measurement Engineering – and the Modern World.
Analogue-to-digital Conversion In one of the earliest articles from this series, we briefly looked at Galvanometers and discussed how they formed the core of many electrical sensors of their day. Today, we’re looking at the device that replaced them. In its purest sense, a digital voltmeter is not a transducer, whereas a galvanometer converts current…
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What on earth is a differential Transformer? Explaining the LVDT.
LVDTs In an earlier article in this series, we looked at proximity probes and discussed the challenges of measuring distance and displacement electronically. Now it’s time to look at one of the other key transducers used to tackle this problem. Very often we are presented with a case where one object moves in relation to…
