IDT Wireless Flow Rate, Humidity&Temp Sensing Kit - Blog 1 - Kit Contents & uses

Summary:

As part of Road Testing the IDT Wireless flow rate, humidity, temperature sensor, I wanted to review what the kit comes with. This is geared to understand who the kit is geared at based on what it comes with and what options are available.

The goal is to try to understand the target market for this evaluation kit, both in terms of engineers and applications. I won't dive too deeply into the guts of the individual components as that will be covered in other posts.

This is the first of a series I'll be posting for this Road Test, followed by the final official RoadTest blog post. I will update with links as others are posted.

This was written before I received the kit (or rather, started before I got the kit, but not finished until much later as I lost three weeks due to work trips and a family emergency). I wanted to research the kit and get a better idea of what to expect. Blog post 3 will contain a lot more "meat and potatoes" as that is where I finally really dig into the kit.

Here is the base kit:

It comes with three main IDT components, two of which are in the sensor cube housing:

1. ZWIR4512 Wifi Hub (based on RaspberryPi Zero W + daughter board with ZWIR4512 System on chip)
2. HS3001 Temperature and Humidity sensor cube (in the sensor cube) (with wireless integration via a second ZWIR4512 module)
3. FS2012 gas flow sensor (in the sensor cube)

In addition, the kit comes with some associated accessories like two power supplies (wireless hub + sensor cube), tubing, USB adapters and HDMI adapter for the RaspberryPi.

The data is read from the temperature/humidity sensor and the flow sensor (if attached) and sent wirelessly over to the sensor hub. The hub can be stand-alone and serve a wifi hotspot, or it can link to an existing wifi network and send the data to Amazon Web Services [AWS] (or at least that is the 'out of the box' option). With the RaspberryPi, the hub can serve as a bridge between a network of multiple hubs adhering to the standards set forth in the 6LoWPAN standards.

Via the 6LoWPAN standard, a mesh network can be used for multiple devices spread out across a wide physical distance. The data can the "hop" back to the hub for logging and other purposes.

This kit does seem like it is largely geared towards demonstrating the wireless module, ZWIR4512 from IDT. There are two of these chips as part of the kit - one in the sensor cube and one in the wireless hub. The sensor cube come equipped with two additional IDT components - the temperature sensor and the flow sensor. They seem to be added in a manner that makes it easy to get data from, but can be easily swapped out for other sensors or I2C devices (within certain limitations). The Datasheet for the wireless chip boasts very low power consumption (something I'd like to test) and a whole host of goodies like the following (taken from the datasheet linked above)

• 19 (ZWIR4512AC1) or 21 (ZWIR4512AC2) GPIOs with multiplexed peripheral functions:
• 2 x UART
• SPI
• 3 x ADC
• 2 x DAC
• 11x PWM
• USB
• CAN
• I2C
• 8 x timer
• Several 5V tolerant I/Os available
• Low current consumption: 3.5µA in Standby Mode; 10.5mA in Receive Mode; 16.0mA in Transmit Mode at 0dBm

According to the IDT Website:

"The ZWIR4512 enables secure low-power wireless IPv6 communication for sensors and small devices. IDT provides a user-programmable, royalty-free 6LoWPAN stack with mesh routing capability with the ZWIR4512. "

Based on this, it looks like the goal is to get the wireless devices out into the hands of engineers so that ecosystems can be built up around them. It sounds like they are trying to make a very powerful (and yet low-powered) device for the IoT world.

The kit comes with a flow sensor from their FS2012 family; specifically the FS2012-1010NG which is a gas flow sensor made for 0-10 Liters / minute. I plan on at least testing this against my radon mitigation system as this uses an air pump to pull gasses from under the house's foundation and vent them above the roofline. In preparing for this, I also purchased from Newark a FS2012-1002L which is a liquid flow sensor made for 0-1 Liters / minute. I plan on testing this with my reverse osmosis (RO) water system as it uses compatible tubing. Other applications for these sensors could be drink mixing devices and the fabled smell-o-vision as certain gases are metered out.

And in the next episode, I'll do some comparison of related modules to what is in the kit, specifically the flow sensor which was the most interesting part of the kit.

Thanks!