Two thermocouples low power wireless sensors network

Abstract

This paper presents technologies and experiments of a wireless sensors using two thermocouples network. It was established that the energy consumption during sensor measurements is usually up to 10 times lower compared to the energy consumption at the time of establishing wireless connection for most protocols. For this reason, new simplified wireless connection protocol was created.

Extremely low energy wireless sensor hardware and software equipment was designed. The newly created universal measurement module allows the use not only thermocouples, but also various types of analogue sensors, thermocouples, pressure bridges, Resistance Temperature Detectors (RTD) and digital sensors communicating through SPI or I2C interface. The newly designed specific power supply scheme allows to supply the sensor and radio module with the voltage from 1.2 V to 3.6 V batteries. When conducting periodic measurements every second, the use of newly designed hardware and software equipment enables the wireless sensor to be operated for up to 3 years from two 1200 mAh capacity batteries.