Dev Kit Weekly: Infineon Xensiv Connected Sensor Kit
December 09, 2022
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A few months ago, the battery in one of the CO2 sensors on the wall of my apartment ran out of juice and began arduously beeping. It took hours for me to get a replacement battery, and then later that night another one started beeping.
Obviously, the CO2 sensors in my apartment aren’t “smart,” otherwise they would have been able to alert me somehow of their battery levels. Something that would have been possible had they been designed with Infineon’s Xensiv Connected Sensor Kit.
Measuring just 14 x 13.8 x 7.5 cubic millimeters, the Xensiv Connected Sensor Kit integrates a PAS CO2 sensor, DPS368 pressure sensor, and Rapid Connect IoT developer kit across two boards. The PAS CO2 sensor is a real carbon dioxide sensor that uses photoacoustic spectroscopy to achieve highly accurate air quality measurements — I’m talking plus/minus 30ppm — in a reduced physical footprint that’s up to 75% smaller than the average commercial CO2 sensors currently on the market.
Meanwhile, the borderline microscopic Xensiv DPS368 is a digital, waterproof barometric pressure and temperature sensor that delivers 2 centimeter precision even while being submerged in 50 meters of water for an hour. Oh, and its average active power consumption is just 1.7 µA @1Hz, so you may not even need it to be “smart” to monitor battery life because the battery is going to last a long, long time.
These gain their intelligence from the Infineon’s PSoC™ 62M MCU located on the Rapid Connect IoT Developer Kit, which features a dual core Arm Cortex-M4F and Cortex-M0+. Optimized for high-performance and low-power consumption of just 22 µA/MHz for the -M4 core and 15 µA/MHz for the M0+ core, the PSoC 62M MCU integrates up to 2 MB of flash and 1 MB of on-chip SRAM, while packing in the Arm Platform Security Architecture’s built-in security measures. These accompany an onboard Infineon Optiga Trust M trust anchor to provide foundational security right from the prototyping phase.
Of course, the Xensiv Connected Sensor Kit is, well, connectable. It comes with both 2.4 and 5 GHz Wi-Fi, as well as Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity options; and as any decidedly not-dumb IoT sensor device does, it can also connect to cloud services such as AWS IoT.
These connectivity options are enabled by the kit’s use of the ModusToolboxTM development environment and SDK, which contains a host of tools, libraries, GitHub-hosted repositories, and code examples to help you connect your device to the cloud and begin applications get your intelligent carbon dioxide monitoring system prototype up and running in a snap.
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If you’d like to get your own, you can purchase one from Infineon for $142.32, but you have to be fast, as they’re running out of stock quickly. But you can avoid supply chain speedbumps, by entering the raffle below for a chance to win this kit for absolutely free — we’ll even pay the shipping.
So, now you know what to do next time your ears are being assaulted by the relentless beeping of stupid sensors — make your own “smart” sensor with the Xensiv Connected Sensor Kit.
