Wireless Analog for Accelerometers
So you’re working on an electronics project and you want to capture the data from your accelerometers wirelessly. The problem: How on earth do you do it?
Wireless is not usually a trivial thing to get into, especially when dealing with wireless analog. For analog signals to go wireless and presevrve signal reliability, you will often need three things: analog data sampling, digital transmission, and signal regeneration. Creating all three and integrating all of these can be challenging, however, keep in mind that here are wireless transceiver modules out there that will do all this for you.
These modules will sample the analog voltage coming from your accelerometer, convert it to digital. For better resolution, make sure that you’re sampling at least 8-bits. Any less that that and your final voltage will be choppy. After sampling, the data is transmitted wirelessly, and regenerate the signal using a DAC. With a good wireless module, this will all be don automatically, and there should be no work on your part.
You may be wondering why digital transmission is best, since there are modules out there that will transmit analog signals directly. The problem with this this is that there is no guarantee that the signal will be regenerated at the correct voltage which was sampled, and it may vary erratically when radio noise is present. Take an AM or FM radio for example, these systems use analog wireless transmission, but notice that when you receive interference that the volume of your radio can oscillate all over the place. To prevent this problem, go digital. If interference presents itself, any good digital system will retransmit the data and reconstruct the original signal accurately.
