Details

When confronted with a sensing application in a high-EMF environment, we designed a sensor board that exchanged Xbee communications for an RS-475 serial link. This board features five analog inputs, two digital interrupt inputs, and an integrated RS-485 driver. The remaining digital IO pins on the ATMega are broken out to connector headers for attaching LEDs or other peripherals.

A base station was designed using the Lissajous IO board and Breadboard prototyping platform to interface 4 of these remote sensors to a computer. Power was also injected over the data cable, enabling a clean and simple setup.

We learned a lot about communcations and polling of multi-sensor networks from this platform and are incorporating some of the best aspects of this board into the Lissajous v4, to be released later this year!