More playing with technology

[ffutures]

Having resisted the siren call of thermal imaging I decided to take a look at my other science posts, noticed this one from 2013:

http://ffutures.livejournal.com/1003932.html

describing the TI Sensortag, a cheap Bluetooth sensing device that might be interesting for school science etc. and comes with free software for Android and iPad / iPhone. I wondered what, if anything, had happened to the technology.

It turns out that what has happened is that they've apparently made it better. The processor is ten times faster, and there are more sensors. The original gizmo included an accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope, barometer, hygrometer, and infra-red thermometer. The new version has ambient light, digital microphone, magnetic sensor, humidity, pressure, accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, object temperature and ambient temperature. .

Since it works out at £24 quid including delivery and VAT I've decided to buy one to play with - not sure I really need it, but if not I'll sell it on. Ought to be here in the next day or two, I'll post when I've tried it out.

http://www.ti.com/ww/en/wireless_connectivity/sensortag2015/?INTC=SensorTag&HQS=sensortag

Comments

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

This looks interesting. I'd be very interested in reading your review of it, once you've had a chance to play around a while.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

It'll probably take a few days - I'm going to be writing it up for a lab technician's forum so I will be trying a lot of things (not testing to destruction though, I think) to see if it's worth considering as an alternative to normal dataloggers.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

At a first look it does most of what they say (can't access the microphone though) but the software (a new version, the old one doesn't work with the new sensortag design) is horrible and only intended as a demo; they want people to use the hardware and add to it, and sell it in embedded systems. It doesn't save data, and has a top sampling rate of 0.1 seconds, a good deal less than other loggers. Bottom line, the hardware may be capable of more but you couldn't prove it without developing better software, which isn't my area of expertise. Can't really say it would be a good investment for a school.