An Intelligent Plug and Play system for Sensor Installation

an intelligent sensor is the integration of an analog or digital sensor or actuator element, a processing unit, and communication interface. Instrumentation that convert the signal to engineering units must know a few things about what parameters to expect from the sensor. That's because full-scale range, sensitivity, connection schemes and other factors all vary greatly for each kind of sensor with monitoring and control electronics. This configuration process can be problematic when gangs of sensors get wired into multichannel measurement systems. Plug and play sensors address the labor involved in connection and configuration. This paper describes an open source implementation which mimics the IEEE 1451.4 standard and provides a platform for transducer configuration as an application of the concept of the plug and play. In particular, an analog sensor that is used as an example, serial connections, and ID of the sensor that is used to mark a specific sensor for automatic identification. An Arduino Uno board was used for this purpose, as well as corresponding software in C# programming language to store the sensor configuration to achieve auto configuration and to display the reading of the sensor. This was demonstrated by a working system which displayed the readings on a Graphical User Interface.