USB-based platform designed to test the functional operation of various sensors

A versatile USB-based platform designed to test the functional operation of various sensor types, the Rohm sensor evaluation kit is now available from Farnell element14. It includes one Base board and several Breakout boards, making them easy to implement on the most popular boards and on standard PCs. The Base board is a controller board with a LAPIS ML610Q112 microcontroller. The Breakout board is a sensor board that can contain various kinds of sensor IC. The ML610Q112 is a high-performance 8-bit CMOS microcontroller into which rich peripheral circuits, such as timers, PWM, UART, I2C bus interface (master/slave), synchronous serial port, voltage level supervisor analogue comparators and 10-bit successive approximation type A/D converter, are incorporated around the 8-bit nX-8/100 CPU. The CPU nX-U8/100 is capable of efficient instruction execution in one-instruction one-clock mode by pipeline architecture parallel processing. The Flash ROM that is installed as program memory, and the on-chip debug function that is installed, enable program debugging and programming on user's board. The source code of the Base Board software can download from the company's web site. Available breakout boards include a Hall-effect sensor, ambient light sensor, UV sensor, MEM sensor, 6-axis e-compass and temperature sensor.