Sensors

Hold your mobile phone vertically, then turn it sideways — the display flips from portrait to landscape by itself. How does the phone know? Two sensors work together to make it happen:

• The accelerometer detects the orientation of the phone — which way it is being held.
• The gyroscope (gyro) tracks the rotation or twist of your hand, adding to the information supplied by the accelerometer.

Sensors in the real world

Sensors are commonly used as monitoring and observing elements in real-world applications: they watch some physical quantity and report on it. The evolution of smart electronic sensors is contributing in a large way to the evolution of IoT itself, and will lead to the creation of new sensor-based, intelligent systems — devices that do not just report raw readings, but act on them.

What is a smart sensor?

A smart sensor is a device that:

1. takes input from the physical environment,
2. uses built-in computing resources to perform predefined functions upon detection of specific input, and
3. processes the data before passing it on. …