Plug-and-Play Sensors
In recent years, there has been a lot of discussion about smart sensors, the IEEE 1451 smart sensor standard, and how these technologies will impact the lives of scientists and engineers as the mass market takes over. Intelligent sensors, in their most evolved form, convert some physical phenomenon into digital information and provide that information in scaled engineering units to a multi-nodal network of intelligent sensors. This information can then be simply acquired and analyzed on a PC, with LabView for example. However, the benefits and mass adoption of smart sensors are far from being realized by most engineers and scientists, largely due to the huge technological leap and the cost associated with the current smart sensor standards. All software and hardware infrastructures must change to make the current implementation of smart sensors a reality.
A newly adapted smart sensor standard, called IEEE P1451.4, will provide many of the benefits of intelligent sensors, such as automatic sensing, configuration and calibration, while retaining existing measurement architectures. By maintaining existing measurement architectures, IEEE P1451.4-compatible hardware can hold investments because it is compatible with traditional sensors and follows the existing measurement hardware architecture model.
The architecture of an IEEE P1451.4 plug-and-play sensor consists of a TEDS (electronic transducer data sheet) and the analog sensor itself. The TEDS provides the configuration, scaling, and calibration information needed to perform a measurement through a mixed-mode interface. This TEDS data is processed by the measurement hardware device driver and is used by the application development environment to reduce the programming load and the setup time of any measurement system.