5.1 Introduction to Multisensors
On this page:
Multisensor activities:
Overview:
In previous activities, you have built sensors to measure only one environmental variable like temperature, light or distance. But scientists often measure more than one variable at a time because sometimes they can be related. For example, in the morning you might measure an increase in light intensity as the sun rises, and also an increase in temperature as the sun warms up the air around you. Measuring more than one variable can tell us about how these conditions affect one another and can help us explain environmental processes in the world around us.
Materials Needed:
Introduction to Multisensors:
In previous modules you learned how the temperature sensor, light sensor, and the distance sensor work. In this section, you will use any combination of those sensors to collect data from multiple sensors at once. How do we collect data from more than one sensor at once? In Introduction to microcontrollers you learned that microcontrollers can communicate with devices like sensors through GPIOs (General Purpose Input/Output pins). By connecting sensors to different GPIOs, microcontrollers enable us to collect data from these sensors simultaneously. In this section, we will refer to a microcontroller with multiple sensors attached as a multisensor.
