Accelerating customer prototyping with module dev. kit

10th August 2018

Enaie Azambuja

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Datasheet

TE Connectivity has announced general availability of AmbiMate MS4 sensor module development kits. The kits allow global engineering and development teams to build prototypes and evaluation boards for systems incorporating TE’s AmbiMate MS4 Series sensor modules. “We are seeing lighting and building controls companies around the world moving quickly to incorporate sensors into their systems,” said Jonathan Catchpole, system architect with TE Connectivity’s Industrial Solutions group.

“In fact, that is why we developed the AmbiMate platform - to allow our customers to incorporate as many as seven smart sensors on one small PCB assembly”.

“What we have added now is the verified, quality software code and the few necessary parts needed to take the sensor module and almost instantly, with either Arduino or Raspberry Pi, start reading the sensor data. This allows our customers to start exploring the potential of the AmbiMate device and everything it can bring to your system design and overall system capability,” said Catchpole.

The core AmbiMate module, the MS4, yields motion, ambient light level, temperature and humidity sensing via durable, production-proven sensor components.

TE Connectivity developed this 32mm x 16mm module platform in order to give its global customers the ability to add these sensors with much less complexity and cost than integrating each individually. A single I2C output provides the system control centre access to all the data the sensors are gathering.

TE designed AmbiMate modules to draw minimal power, such that battery-powered operation with long battery life from a small form factor, lightweight battery is possible.

The TE AmbiMate platform has versions with volatile organic compound (VOC) and equivalent calculated (eCO2) sensors and data output. This capability is increasingly in demand for monitoring air quality and complying with air quality regulations worldwide.

Arduino and Raspberry Pi are two key platforms that have emerged in recent years that allow what industry observers see as a major 'democratisation' of electronics engineering.

These - inexpensive, typically credit-card sized computers allow students, young engineers and hobbyists as well as professional developers to access electronic components and more easily 'play' with the code that controls them.

In the case of AmbiMate MS4 sensor modules, developers get to see and explore up to nine streams of operational data that the system can collect, act upon or feed to larger analytics operations in the cloud.