Enhanced Microcontroller Interface of Resistive Sensors Through Resistance-to-Time Converter

Systems using microcontrollers make the interface of a transducer with the digital world much easier. They build smart, lucid, compact, cheap, and less power consuming electronic interfaces. Limited acquisition time is critical for many industrial applications. Single-element resistive sensors are used on a large scale. An attempt has been made to reduce the acquisition time of the measuring system compared to the existing work which converts the change in sensor resistance to the change in time with three charge-discharge cycles. Efforts have been made in this paper to reduce this to two charge-discharge cycles. The proposed work also compensates the errors due to lead wire resistance, the change in lead wire resistance, port pin resistances, and varying ambient temperature with reduced acquisition time. The mean of absolute errors, standard deviation, integral squared error (ISE), nonlinearity, and hysteresis of the proposed method have been computed. Simulation and experimentation study of the proposed system provided encouraging results. The mean of absolute errors and standard deviation of the proposed method in the simulation were 0.07 and 0.08 Omega, respectively. Furthermore, during experimentation, the values of the mean of absolute errors and standard deviation were 0.11 and 0.11 Omega, respectively. ISE was found to be 0.09 and 0.19 in simulation and experimentation, respectively. The proposed two-cycle method has an acquisition time of only 60% of the three-cycle method with no reduction in performance.