Sensor Integration

Projects General Guidance
1

Hi,

I am working on a project which involves the integration of a number of different sensors for continuous monitoring. These sensors include:
EEG - OpenBCI Cyton board
Oximetry/temperature - MAX30105
a microphone
a photo-resistor

I am planning on using an arduino board to integrate all of these sensors.

Can anybody recommend a particular arduino board that would be best for my project?

Thanks
Sam

2

It depends on what you want to do with the sensors. For example, don't plan on recording high quality audio with the microphone.

3

Thanks for your reply.

I dont need high quality audio recordings

Thanks,
Sam

4

The following should be no problem to integrate with an Arduino, :

Can you produce a link to this: EEG - OpenBCI Cyton board ?
I did a quick look but could only find something which integrated directly with a PC.

EDIT: Link corrected

5

6v6gt:

  • a microphone (restricted audio quality as already mentioned)

I don't see an Uno or similar as able to record audio and do other things at the same time. Even if recording at the maximum 9615 sps you still have to write out all that data somehow, and then there's not much computing power left for other things.

6

Hi,
How are you aiming to output the information you gather with all these sensors?

What is the application, what are you trying to attain?

Thanks... Tom.... :slight_smile:

7

The link to the EEG is here:

8

wvmarle,
If the audio is low quality, do you think an arduino or similar product will be able to process multiple inputs (sound, light, oximetry) at the same time?

One idea is to have the arduino processing these inputs and the EEG inputs processed separately.

TomGeorge,
I would like to output the data to a PC for processing. I am not yet sure how I am going to do this. Do you have any recommendations?
The application: I am developing a device to monitor a number of physiological parameters alongside environmental noise.

Thanks,
Sam

9

The typical way of transferring data from the Arduino to the PC would be over the Serial/USB interface.

Highest quality sampling is some 9.6 kbps at 10 bits. The ADC can run at higher speed but you lose accuracy - and have even more data to deal with. This is already nearly 20kB/s, requiring a Serial speed of at least 200 kbps transmitting as binary data, but in reality you need a higher speed to allow for overhead and the other sensor data. Should be no problem for an Arduino to reach some 500 kbps.

You will HAVE to set the ADC in free running mode, firing an interrupt every time it's done, as if you use the standard analogRead() calls you spend all the time waiting for conversions to complete, and your device has other things to do. As that's almost ten thousand interrupts a second this requires some really careful programming on your side to not interfere with the reading of the other sensors and the communication to your PC.