 Okay, IonMPI, brought to you by Digi-Key and Adafruit, Lydia, what is this week's IonMPI? Okay, this week's IonMPI is by Murata. They make all sorts of precision industrial sensors and devices. We've covered them before from some of their power supply stuff, including a cool video. But this week we're going to cover an interesting part I've never used before. It's an inclinometer. This is the SCL3300 inclinometer. It is a sensor that, as you may guess, measures inclines, tilt. This is a fairly new sensor. It's got the SPI interface. It's kind of this big chunky piece, runs on three volts, and will give you both acceleration out and angle, tilt angle, has a couple different modes, and we'll go into those in more detail. The first thing you might be wondering is, well, wait a minute, an inclinometer measures tilt against the Earth's gravitational field, because the ground may not be flat, but the center of Earth where gravity points towards is going to be a constant, and so that's a good way of measuring what's flat. A lot of people, engineers who might be watching will be like, hey, why don't you just use an accelerometer? Accelerometer measures gravity, and then when you measure gravity against three axes, you can tell where the vector of gravity is pointing, and then you kind of do a little bit of sine cosine action there. As shown here, this is a nice app note I think that I found here, they're from STR and XP. You can do the math and figure out what the angle in the 3D angle vector is towards center of gravity, that's your tilt, so why not just use an accelerometer? We do have a lot of accelerometers, and one of the demos that we often have for accelerometers is, yes, taking the meters per second squared measurement, if something's totally flat against the ground, the x will be zero, the y will be zero, and the z will be negative 9.8 meters per second squared, because that's your gravitational force, and of course, if you're moving it, you'll get the acceleration of motion as well as the acceleration of gravity, but as long as things are staying still, yes, you can measure tilt. The answer is yes, you can use an accelerometer for that, however, accelerometers tend to be designed for high motion, they're meant for a game, a toy, or a detecting tilt for a monitor or a phone, whether you've tilted it for landscape or portrait, they're not designed for very delicate small angle measurements. So, for example, here, this is a common accelerometer, and you can see when you get into the highest resolution mode possible, you get 1 milli G, G is 9.8 meters per second, 1 milli G per least significant digit, whereas for the SCL3300, they have it in inverse, they say the best is going to be 12,000 LSB per G, if you invert it, blah, blah, blah, it's .08, so it's about 12, 15 times more precise than even a 2G accelerometer. So, basically, it isn't an accelerometer, but it's a very, very precise, stable, and accurate accelerometer that won't have a very high range on purpose because it's designed to measure just gravitational, like it doesn't really go above, as you see, 1.2G, it's designed really to only measure small changes in tilt and incline, not motion, like this is a very bad sensor if you want to measure a tap or a hit or a car acceleration, not good, very good for it staying very still, it's on a piece of equipment or it's on a bridge or a building and it's measuring the tilt changes. Another thing is compared to low-cost accelerometers, you're going to have much, much better temperature stability and also just offset stability over time. So, using these sensors, they're basically just really, really, really, really good accelerometers that are not meant for active motion, and so you're going to pay more because it is 10, 20 times more precise and more accurate, you're going to get a lot more bits of precision, you're going to get a lot more accuracy as well, and you're going to pay for it, and usually accelerometers, again, they're not designed for this, so it's kind of a subset of an accelerometer. Another thing is the noise density, here is a, sorry, this is the SCL3300, so you can see the best noise density is about 15 micro G per root hertz, and then for a common, sorry, one moment, for a common accelerometer, you're going to get 220 micro G per root hertz, so basically, again, 10 to 15 times lower noise, which is important because you want to make sure not only are you getting the data, but you're not going to get a lot of variation in the data because it's meant for long-term measurements. Next up, like many sensors that are designed for industrial or robotic uses, the data has status, you can get status of the sensor, which I think is really important, and there's a CRC checksum for SPI as well, so you can make sure that the data you're sending and receiving comes in correctly, you don't get any bit errors due to noise or what have you, something that I look for in a good quality sensor. If you're paying the money for an inclinometer, you want to make sure the data you're getting is really the right data. Also available in an eval board, if you want to get started real quickly, this eval board has all little passives ready for you, it's breadboard friendly, it's got big honking mounting holes, four of them so you can stay nice and secure, and then you can read the SPI data out with any microcontroller or microcomputer. Available on Digikey. It's in stock. Yeah, this is a screenshot from just right before the show. It's available, you can buy it, that's really important. And I looked and as for inclinometers, this is definitely the least expensive inclinometer, but it's fully featured and I think will do the job quite well for all sorts of industrial and robotic purposes. Okay, and we have a video. Yes, so I'll say one thing, the video is for the SCA3300, that's the accelerometer version, but it's, I believe they're either very similar or this is a reprogrammed version, it's the same functionality, it's just this is the inclinometer output, not the accelerometer output. And that's this week's eye-opening.