Creating a Transducer Electronic Datasheet using I2C Serial EEPROM Memory and PIC32-Based Microcontroller Development Board

摘要

The present paper describes a software method for creating / managing one type of Transducer Electronic Datasheet (TEDS) according to IEEE 1451.4 standard in order to develop a prototype of smart multi-sensor platform (with up to ten different analog sensors simultaneously connected) with Plug & Play capabilities over ETHERNET and Wi-Fi. In the experiments were used: one analog temperature sensor, one analog light sensor, one PIC32-based microcontroller development board with analog and digital I/O ports and other computing resources, one 24LC256 I2C (Inter Integrated Circuit standard) serial Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory (EEPROM) memory with 32KB available space and 3 bytes internal buffer for page writes (1 byte for data and 2 bytes for address). It was developed a prototype algorithm for writing and reading TEDS information to / from I2C EEPROM memories using the standard C language (up to ten different TEDS blocks coexisting in the same EEPROM device at once). The algorithm is able to write and read one type of TEDS: transducer information with standard TEDS content. A second software application, written in VB.NET platform, was developed in order to access the EEPROM sensor information from a computer through a serial interface (USB).