EYE on NPI - Amphenol All Sensors' ELVH Series Digital and Analog Pressure Sensors

Adafruit Industries

This week's EYE ON NPI is a treasure, and will measure pressure with pleasure...it's the Amphenol All Sensors' ELVH Series Digital and Analog Pressure Sensors (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/a/all-sensors/elvh-series-digital-and-analog-pressure-sensors). A family of temperature and pressure sensors with a ton of different configurations so you can definitely fit it into your design no matter what interface or usage range. These sensors integrate a process improvement to the sensing element: the CoBeam2 series is a MEMS etched piezo-resistive 'strain gauge diaphragm'. This li'l chunk of silicon creates a Wheatstone bridge where the pressure against the die makes microscopically small changes to the resistances that can be measured on the differential output. That's not surprising: pretty much all absolute or differential pressure sensors come as 4-element Wheatstone bridge configuration (https://www.digikey.com/short/jp83d457) - and these require extra analog circuitry to handle and amplify the small voltage change readings, or a high precision ADC - we've covered 24-bit ADCs for reading bridge sensors on earlier EYE ON NPIs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Xkr7OjHQfU). With the ELVH family of sensors, you can get cleaned-up ratiometric analog output, or ready-to-integrate I2C or SPI - so you can pair these even with fully-digital microcontrollers or microcomputers that have no analog inputs. Plus, since its digitized already, you also get bonus status bits and temperature reads. This full family of pressure and temperature sensors comes in a dizzying set of possible packages and configurations, from SMT J-Lead to through hole DIP or SIP. There's also both absolute and differential input-ports, and barbed, needle or flat ports that can connect with common tubing to measure pressure inside a cavity or ambiently. Of course, temperature will always be an 'on-chip' ambient measurement. For any sort of industrial or medical purpose, you can pick the pressure range from as low as 1inH2O (0.0025 bar) to +10 bar. Finally, both I2C and SPI are available for digital read-out, or analog if you want to maintain compatibility with older sensors. If you're designing a product that requires measuring air or gas pressure, and you want to skip the whole analog-front-end development part to get to market fast - check out these Amphenol All Sensors' ELVH Series (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/a/all-sensors/elvh-series-digital-and-analog-pressure-sensors) - DigiKey stocks almost 200 different varieties of the ELVH sensor family (https://www.digikey.com/short/m4vr4wr5) which means that even if your requirements change during R&D, you will be able to get perfect pressure readings. Since they are in stock for immediate shipment, you can order tonight and get any flavor you like by tomorrow morning.