 They're great search for it. Did you get it here? Yay. Okay. What are you searching for this week? Okay, so we chatted about This nine-dof accelerometer magnetometer gyro from Bosch that I'm working on the stem and QT Board for and that kind of got me thinking about accelerometers And I thought you know accelerometers are a really common sensor that people integrate into their project or product They're very inexpensive these days They're quite powerful and they can be used to sense a lot of things like motion tilt shaking tapping accelerometers kind of do it all and I thought it would be good to show the different kinds of accelerometers you can get on digikey because there's a lot of them and an interesting way to also export data from digikey for more analysis, so Let's go to the computer Okay So we'll start by first talking about what kind of accelerometer we're gonna get I want a surface-bound accelerometer that can solder onto a board I want one that can be interfaced with my microcontroller or you know, whatever host processor it is I'm going to assume it's a 3.3 volt device. Although. There's a couple accelerometers that can be used in a very wide voltage range I'm gonna look at both analog and digital accelerometers and I'm also going to Show sorting by price and some of the extras you can get In accelerometers because they they're kind of stuffed full of extra goodies these days So the toughest part of this is actually a spelling accelerometer there's two C's one L and There's a lot. There's also like you know a lot of dev boards accessible accessories and such but you know I want the sensor transducer motion sensor accelerometer. There's also different kinds of motion sensors like inclinometers And vibration sensors, but in this case the motion sensor. I want is accelerometer as always I'm going to go straight up for the active parts only And I want ones that are normally stocking That you know, they're they may not be in stock today, but in general they're in stock And I won't go house compliance. There's pretty much all of them anyways Okay, so next up you can pick axis There's like dash which usually, you know, it means uncategorized X XY XY Z and Z accelerometers used to come in single axis and you know if you look at These you'll see some these are like really old school style like MLG accelerometers These are not Used by most people Some of these are like mill spec. That's why they're expensive. Some of them are like 500 G In general, you're not gonna want a single axis accelerometer as you can see the price are quite high because they're very specialized usage You'll see that when you had accelerometer single axis if you wanted Multiple axes you'd actually have to get three accelerometers and like solder them with 90 degree orientation. It was kind of horrible We're just gonna go for the Triple axis X Y and Z. I also like to always include the dash Sometimes the dash is from like really old products or products that like maybe it's unclear what the data is I like to include them anyways, although I almost never end up picking those products because it's usually like some weird outlier But in this case, I'm just gonna apply these filters Okay, next up You can pick you just start to see like okay got these accelerometers I'm going to pick ones that are surface mount Just most of them There's also like free-hanging. I guess it's like a that's some sort of module and Lost myself. There's chassis mount. What are those? Oh So chassis this is like an all-in-one You know like integrated accelerometer module. This is not like a raw chip. Well, this is $4,000 There's some nice expensive things on the jickey. I wonder what the most expensive thing is I think it's like probably an FPGA for like Military usage. It's gonna my guess box box a ram box a ram. Okay, so But back to this I want a surface mount I'm not I'm not ready for the $4,000 module Um, okay, so type and Type kind of goes with output type So in all honesty every accelerometer's analog in the in the in the bear details. It's it's a flexible men's Kind of like finger joint that moves up and down with acceleration And then it the capacitance of that changes and it's measured through an ADC But sometimes they toss the ADC in and that's when you get You know a digital type if you want an analog voltage output, which you know, some people really like them Actually, we sell a couple and they're quite popular One thing that's nice is that you can get them With you're not so there's a 200 g1 But they're usually ratio metric If you have an ADC you can of course sample it as quickly as you want Um Analog devices makes a popular series ADXL series STM also has them You know, I don't see people using analog accelerometers as much anymore because they they have ones that are built in digital But there are some situations where like maybe you do want to have it integrate with an analog circuit So there's no like digital reading. For example, you could have a A trip wire circuit like, you know a shake detector that looks for an absolute voltage change And then that gets latched and triggers some circuit It might be might be a less expensive and might be more reliable If you just have the pure analog output because there's no like configuration and setup and like initialization required It just you turn it on and it instantly works. So I love this has some uses But in this case, I'm gonna go with I squared C or SPI. I want a digital output Next check out the voltage, you know with sensors. I've been I've been trapped by this I've been I've been tricked. I see a sensor really like and then I don't notice until it's too late that it doesn't run at the Voltage range. I want it to If you're using 1.8 volt electronics or 3.3 volt You want to take a look make sure that it either can you know can do both but isn't one or the other for example there's three of them that are 1.8 volt only and There's three that are only up to about two volts and nine that don't go past two point seven So if you want to make sure that it runs at three point three volts I usually select all and then like control click to deselect The ones that won't fit now. You'll notice that there's none that are five volt There's five volts there. I mean there might be one or two analog ones I can run at five volts, but these days they're all gonna be three point three or one point eight Okay, next up Acceleration ranges so likewise. There's there's actually kind of like only Two and a half ranges for accelerometers. There's either the like 16 gene below eight eight to 16 gene below The 40 G and then like the 100 plus G's so 100 plus G's is if you're dealing with Like massive shock detection Rocketry like explosions. I don't know. It's something. It's 200 G is like a huge amount of G's So if you know race car stuff if that's what you need, you know it and you should you should get those We do sell a couple hundred G Accelerometers, but for the most part if you're just detecting like user motion, you're gonna want to stick Eight G and below often, you know user motion doesn't really even get below up get above 4g again 1g is just normal gravity. So think you know do things really accelerate more than four times the speed of gravity and then For sports like, you know humans bumping into their humans at high speeds and high masses For those you're gonna want like 16 to 32 G's. That's what usually like sports activity accelerometers are for In this case, you know, I just I I don't mind having slightly Higher than the 8g, but I don't I definitely don't need the 200 G's So and you're not gonna get ones that built through 204 like you either get like the 1 2 3 4, you know 1 2 4 8 range or the 100 200 So again select all and then use the control key to click away the ones that are You know way higher than I'm expecting to use Just about like 2g Okay, cool. Okay, there's also features So here's the deal with features because They're they're helpful when looking at sensors But I always rely on the datasheet because these are very easy to like Get wrong or misunderstand. So it's not that You know, it's something will have a low-pass filter and this is like a total lie It's just that there might be ones that do have a low-pass filter, but it's like a different kind then what you want maybe the low-pass filter only like Has a differential mode. I mean, there's all sorts of like weirdnesses with each accelerometer. So Features gives you a sense of what it does, but I don't use this as a pure way to filter out chips and Then here's another thing that I do want to mention because as you're looking at sensors This comes up if you're sometimes you're looking for sizes like when we did the inductor video I remember I was like, I really wanted to be less than four by four millimeters We're not going to get necessarily like you do have like the sizes here, but they're not It's not like written out the same way. So what you have to do is you have to read The package device and these numbers at the end are the millimeter by millimeter size. So for example this Qfn is three by three and this LGA is one point six by one point six And I'll give you a sense of how big it's going to be on the circuit board and also conversely how hard it's going to be to solder You want something with the fewest pins in the largest package to make it easy to solder less yield problems Something that's going to be, you know, less than two by two millimeters or like this CSP, which is, you know, one point three by one millimeter That's going to be very very small not going to be very hand solder ball or even hot air solder ball perhaps. So Keep that in mind. I don't not too picky. I will say like, you know, I don't really want it to go beyond This size like I don't I don't want it to be four by four or five by five So I can apply that filter and then you can just start looking at The chips that are available and I think, you know here you can of course go by cost In which case nothing beats this Keonix KXT J3 The fact that there's 30,000 stock makes me think like wow the people really do like this That's a lot of stock to hold of a single sensor Hard to beat at fifty one point eight cents though There's definitely price wars that occur with accelerometers. This is my favorite the list 3dH as well And of course the Bosch sensor text down here Another thing I just want to note. I don't use this very often, but it's good to have especially when you want to do Maybe more detailed analysis There's this download table button and when you download the table, you'll actually get The exported data from digikey with all of the different The the data with all the the table headers so in this case if you want to if you're good at Excel or You know spreadsheet programming you could for example filter out, you know only ones that contain the word Sleep mode or something now for this short list Maybe it doesn't matter so much But if you have like, you know a thousand items and you want to you don't have to page through them You want to quickly sort them and you might want to sort by you know multiple Columns in order like sort by this one and then sub sort by another one or or divide and conquer You can use your spreadsheet program. You don't have to use a digikey site It's got great search and it can do the selection modes, but this data is the same data So that's another top tip For a great search Okay