Reference Designs for Sensors used in Microcontroller-Based Design Projects

This paper describes a collection of tested reference designs that students can leverage into their microcontroller-based design projects with confidence. The collection is confined to common sensors such as accelerometers, digital compasses, infrared distance sensors, ultrasonic distance sensors, temperature sensors, pressure sensors, and Hall Effect sensors. These reference designs are useful for microcontroller applications and capstone design courses in our curriculum. The benefit of using these reference designs is the reduction of the time that students would have spent on re-inventing them by themselves. A website was developed for hosting these reference designs for students to download. The information for the reference designs in the website is presented in a manner that the students must do a little extra work in order to use them in their projects. Further, the code snippets provided in the website is intentionally condensed so that the students need to write extra codes for their applications. Some of the reference designs were part of our students’ microcontroller-based projects. Some of these projects are briefly described in this paper. Also described are the merits and impact of these reference designs to our students in their engineering education. These reference designs promote hands-on experience. They can be easily adopted into laboratory and experimental courses. They are suitable for engineering curricula that emphasize on hands-on experience.