Industry Article

How to Set Up ROHM’s Arduino Sensor Shield for IoT | AAC How-To

October 03, 2018 by ROHM Semiconductor

This video demonstrates how to set up and use ROHM's sensor evaluation kit for IoT for prototyping and testing new IoT devices.

This video demonstrates how to set up and use ROHM's sensor evaluation kit for IoT for prototyping and testing new IoT devices.

 

 

The evaluation kit includes an Arduino shield that lets you plug in combinations of these eight sensor modules so that you can create the platform you need for whatever you’re building. The sensor modules include an accelerometer, a pressure sensor, a magnetometer, an optical proximity and ambient light sensor, a color sensor, a heart rate sensor, a hall sensor, and a temperature sensor.

The shield has eight slots: two analog, one GPIO, and five I2C, but six of the sensors work on I2C so you won’t be able to use all eight modules at the same time. To use the sensors you want, though, you just plug them in and pull the relevant example code into the Arduino IDE.

To monitor temperature, for example, plug in the temperature sensor module, upload the example code to an Arduino and get data back on the serial monitor. But if I want to add more, I just plug in those sensors and pull the example code into one file. I’ll add the pressure sensor, accelerometer, magnetometer, proximity and ambient light sensor, and color sensor to the shield. 

On the IDE, I copied over the relevant bits of code and made a few tweaks for readability, but this is mostly just copy and paste. So, I can upload that and then check the serial monitor, and you can see all of the inits first and then the data coming in. One thing to note is that the pressure sensor has an integrated temperature sensor for temperature compensation, and you can see there’s a slight difference between that temperature measurement and the reading from the analog temperature sensor.

So you can see that in a matter of a few minutes that mostly consisted of plugging in modules and loading example code, I have a platform that I can test out sensors and very easily start prototyping.  I used an Arduino in this example for its simplicity, but the kit is, of course, compatible with other platforms, such as mbed, that use the Arduino shield footprint. 

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