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Sensors Studio

Can You?

  • If you know the difference between the odour of garbage and the fragrance of perfume, your nose is in good form.
  • If you know soft the fur of a puppy is, then your skin is doing its job perfectly.
  • If you know what Pizza and Noodles taste like, congratulations, you have a fully functional tongue. Maybe start a food blog, eh?
  • If you can differentiate between rock and pop music just by listening, your ears work mighty fine.
  • And, if you are able to read this, then boy aren’t your eyes lucky and you, even luckier! (Just kidding!)

But, the real question here is this: what is common in of all these cases? Which action is common to all of them?

The Boss and her Right-hand Men

If you adjust your thinking cap a little, you’ll definitely have the eureka moment. In all of these cases, our nose, skin, tongue, ears, and eyes are sensing whatever is outside our body and then discuss it with our brain which then decides how to respond to it. But that is a different story.

Senses of Human Body

These fabulous 5 are collectively what are called sensors: the skilled people that detect what is happening in the environment that surrounds it and share this information with the boss, who decides how to respond to it.

The best thing about them is that they can work on their own and have the ability to interact with the boss, i.e. the brain of the system; this eliminates the need to manually operate the system for the smallest of things. This is the reason why having sensors on machines and devices is a big advantage.  E.g. these days, A/Cs come with inbuilt sensors that can sense the temperature of the room and adjust the cooling accordingly, eliminating the need to control it manually using a remote.

Types

There are quite a handful of sensors that we use in electronics for sensing different physical quantities such as temperature, distance, the presence of an obstacle, light, etc. Some of these sensors are:

  • Temperature sensor, e.g. thermometer
  • Ultrasonic sensor
  • Light sensor, e.g. LDR
  • IR sensor
  • Touch sensor, e.g. the touch screen of a smartphone