#sensors

Controlled Environment Agriculture September 14, 2026 Lab

CEA sensing and image estimation — sensor placement and projected leaf area

Combine CO₂, EC, pH, DO, flow, level and pressure to separate spatial differences, instrument bias and sample transport delay. Check circulation, ventilation and water-balance residuals.

Learning guide · 18 min Robotics Primer September 7, 2026

Hydraulic Systems Primer — From Pascal's Principle to Force Control in Robots

Why can a small input move a hydraulic excavator's massive arm? This article treats the pump, control valves, cylinder, hydraulic fluid, sensors, and controller as a single closed loop, covering the pressure/flow/efficiency equations, current technology in construction and agricultural machinery, and electro-hydraulic conversion and current research, with diagrams.

Fundamentals · 8 min Sensors & Hardware September 4, 2026

How Temperature Sensors Work, and the Products That Define the Category — Thermocouples, PT100, DS18B20

Every temperature sensor does the same one thing — turns heat into an electrical signal — but the physics underneath splits into four separate families: the Seebeck effect in thermocouples, the resistance-temperature relationship in RTDs and thermistors, the bandgap behavior of semiconductor ICs, and the Stefan-Boltzmann law behind infrared radiation thermometers. This piece traces the history from Seebeck's 1821 misunderstanding, through the Callendar-Van Dusen equation that calibrates PT100 sensors, to a spec comparison of real ICs like the DS18B20, TMP117, and MLX90614, and a real-world case of an F1 car reading tire temperature with 12 non-contact IR sensors.

Fundamentals · 16 min Sensors & Hardware September 3, 2026

How Magnetometers Work and the Key Products — Bosch, ST, Honeywell

The magnetometer, which senses the direction of Earth's magnetic field to derive heading, is the one sensor that keeps returning an absolute-direction external reference as long as it has power — from a smartphone's electronic compass, to yaw-angle correction on a drone, to attitude control on a CubeSat. This article lays out the four underlying physical principles — the Hall effect, AMR, GMR, and fluxgate — compares real chip specs across the Bosch BMM150, STMicroelectronics LIS3MDL, and Honeywell HMC5883L, covers hard-iron/soft-iron error and its calibration, AHRS sensor fusion with an IMU, and the technology's history from ore prospecting through WWII submarine hunting and lunar exploration to today's CubeSat attitude control.

Fundamentals · 14 min Sensors & Hardware September 3, 2026

How Wireless Communication Modules Work — ESP32, nRF52840, SX1262

What carries a sensor's measured value outside its enclosure is, almost always, a radio wave. We trace how Wi-Fi's OFDM uses orthogonal subcarriers to overcome multipath, how BLE's GFSK modulation and star topology enable duty-cycled operation, and how LoRa's Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS) trades range for data rate across the SF7-12 spreading-factor range — all through the real numbers of chips like the ESP32-C6, Nordic nRF52840, Semtech SX1262, TI CC2652R7, and MultiTech mDot. From the 1999 naming drama behind Wi-Fi, to the name Bluetooth born from a 10th-century Danish king's epithet in 1996, to the story of how LoRa, built by a small French startup, was acquired by Semtech, to the real-world example of ZENNER's LoRaWAN smart-meter network scaling past 10 million devices, we look at how to choose frequency band, transmit power, sensitivity, and topology.

Fundamentals · 14 min Sensors & Hardware September 2, 2026

How Force & Tactile Sensors Work — ATI, Bota, XELA

Force sensors give a robot arm its 'sense of the arm,' and tactile sensors give a robot hand its 'sense of the fingertips.' We trace the physics from strain gauges through three tactile-sensing approaches — piezoresistive, capacitive, and optical — and survey real products from ATI, Bota Systems, and XELA Robotics to Shadow Robot's prosthetic-style hand carrying 129 sensors, alongside the true story of the strain gauge's simultaneous invention in 1938.

Fundamentals · 14 min Sensors & Hardware August 28, 2026

How Ultrasonic Sensors Work and Key Products — Bosch, Murata, Toyota ICS

An ultrasonic sensor measures a nearby obstacle's distance from the round-trip time of an ultrasonic pulse — the acoustic counterpart to LiDAR. It can see straight through what trips up optical sensors, transparent glass and black objects included, but its effective range tops out at a few meters. We work through bat-echolocation research, sonar's development in the First World War, the Bosch USS Gen 6's measured range, the Murata MA40S4S and MaxBotix modules that are staples of robotics, and the real-world example of Toyota's eight-sensor Intelligent Clearance Sonar — and how each of these changes what performance you actually get.

Fundamentals · 10 min Sensors & Hardware August 22, 2026

How Radar Works and Key Products — Continental, Bosch, Honda SENSING

Millimeter-wave radar measures distance and relative velocity from the reflection of radio waves, making it the sensor most resistant to rain, fog, glare, and other adverse conditions that give optical sensors trouble. We work through how FMCW's beat frequency yields distance and velocity simultaneously, radar's technology lineage running back to Chain Home in the Second World War, Tesla's abandonment and later reinstatement of radar, the 4D imaging specs of the Continental ARS540, and the real-world example of Honda SENSING 360's five-radar 360-degree coverage — and how each of these changes the range/field-of-view/resolution trade-off.

Fundamentals · 9 min Sensors & Hardware August 16, 2026 Lab

How GNSS Works and Key Products — u-blox, Trimble, Fixposition

RTK combines satellite positioning with correction data from a base station, shrinking the several-meter error of standalone GNSS positioning down to centimeter level. We work through how dual-frequency positioning cancels ionospheric delay, how u-blox's ZED-F9P drove low-cost RTK into the mainstream, Trimble RTX and Japan's own Michibiki (QZSS), and the real-world example of Kubota's nationwide network of 342 RTK base stations for farm machinery — and how each of these changes what positioning accuracy you actually get.

Fundamentals · 13 min Sensors & Hardware August 10, 2026

How IMUs Work and Key Products — Xsens, Bosch, Analog Devices

An IMU pairs an accelerometer with a gyroscope to directly sense a vehicle's own translational acceleration and rotational rate. Unlike cameras or LiDAR, it depends on nothing external — but that self-containment comes with an inescapable fate: error accumulates over time (drift). We work through the MEMS gyroscope principle, Allan-variance noise analysis, the grading scale from consumer chips to navigation-grade modules, and Xsens's MTi series product strategy.

Fundamentals · 10 min