Overview

Description

Renesas has a wealth of sensors; however, to use these in a sensible environment, a control MCU is needed as well as an output medium. To enable the sensors to be tested/connected to different MCU families, a common electrical and mechanically stable plug-in interface is needed. The latest MCU evaluation kits are being equipped with an Arduino Shield interface, which is a standardized interface. A set of widely used sensors have been integrated in this Arduino Shield, which all share the I2C control interface – on different addresses.

System Benefits​:

  • The six different I2C-connected sensors that are implemented, share the common interface with some overlapping I2C addresses, therefore an I2C buffer/splitter IC has been added into the design.
  • An Arduino interface has only two interrupt lines (by default), therefore a wired AND has been added to the circuit to allow the use of interrupt outputs from the sensors.
  • The sensor board is completely passive, this allows the board to be plugged into any Arduino Shield equipped evaluation kit.
  • Single 3.3V input picked up from the host MCU (Arduino) interface.
  • Multiple sensors on one board for quick evaluation.
  • All sensors are enabled by default, but jumpers allow sensors to be disabled individually.
Image

Comparison

Applications

Applications

  • Evaluation of any sensor platform