New ! The Yocto-RangeFinder

By mvuilleu, in New stuff and Measures, march 17,2017.

We are adding today a new product to our family of position sensors: the Yocto-RangeFinder. It is a kind of intermediate between the low-cost Yocto-Proximity and a precise but expensive laser rangefinder. So let's see how much you can expect from this new piece of hardware...

Yocto-RS232, SCPI and lab Instruments

By martinm, in Measures and Programming, february 10,2017.

Nowadays, most laboratory measuring tools have an RS232 port and/or a USB port, enabling you to drive them remotely. Usually, the manufacturers of this kind of instruments offer a proprietary software to drive them from a computer. This piece of software is usually more or less easy to use and not necessarily free. Obviously, it is tempting to get rid of the original software and to drive the devices on one's own. The question that we pondered this week was to know whether there was a universal way to drive this kind of equipment from an arbitrary software.

The Yocto-Thermocouple and ground loops

By martinm, in Measures, december 30,2016.

From time to time, a customer contacts Yoctopuce support to complain about significant instabilities on measures performed with a Yocto-Thermocouple. Each time, the conclusion is the same: the instabilities are the result of an unwanted ground loop. The Yocto-Thermocouple is not an electrically isolated module: there is no electric separation between the measuring part and the USB part. This has consequences that you must clearly understand. This is what we are going to explain this week.

Logging and retrieving measures without network access

By mvuilleu, in Tiny PC and Measures, december 02,2016.

Even in the Internet of Things era, there are automation and measuring applications that require to work in a completely autonomous way, without any network connection of any kind. Someone asked us recently how to implement such an autonomous data logger using our sensors. The system should not require any network connection but use a USB key to retrieve the data. We are going to cover this example in details and at the same time take this opportunity to test a relatively new mini-computer that we recently discovered...

Measuring outside air quality

By mvuilleu, in Measures, october 21,2016.

There is no magical sensor able to measure air quality in any circumstance: for each environment, you must select the appropriate sensor. We have already presented in this blog some ways to evaluate inside air quality, in particular to detect stale air because of CO2. We also talked about sensors that you can use to detect toxic or foul smelling gases, used in particular in the industry. Today, we address how to measure the quality of outside air, that is, the air that everyone breathes daily.