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Re: Mobile Sensorium [was Re: Time for Serious GPS Application]

From: Eric Laforest <>
Date: Mon, 1 Jan 2001 22:45:01 -0500

On Mon, Jan 01, 2001 at 10:52:24AM -0800, Doug Sutherland thus spake:
> In the meantime I added new microcontroller circuitry, 
> and I'm now a walking weather station! I have sensors 
> for humidity and barometer, a network of DS1820 temp 
> sensors, and a dozen 12-bit A/D converters for other 
> sensor connections. I have all of the following devices
> connected to a single RS232 serial port on the wearable:
> 

Pretty f*****g impressive!

However, a couple questions and a comment:

How big is this getup (given your wanting to shrink things) ?

Getting your body temp from an extremity is probably not accurate at all.
Think of the places a thermometer is placed...(ick)...leaves only
the armpit as a workable location to get a good measure of body temp.

Finally, although the BX24/uController setup is thrifty of serial
ports, it is rather heterogenous.  Given that neither the BX24
or the microcontroller can be reprogrammed stand-alone, wouldn't that
make it a pain to reconfigure?
Cost aside, why not use a small cheap, serial-programmable SBC like
the New Micro ones, use a PAL for address decoding and then set up a 
little bit of software to manage the sensors through polling and/or
interrupts?
It seems to me to be more flexible, use fewer parts, and not be dependent
on external hardware/software as the uC/BX24 are?
(OK, the PAL needs to be put in a chip programmer, but given that it only
has and can do a finite amount of address decoding, it should not require
any alterations short of a major redesign assuming a couple of decode
lines are leftover for expansion.)

Eric LaForest

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