More Than 3,200 TEDS Smart Sensor ProductsNational Instruments and leading sensor manufacturersparticipating in the Sensors Plug&Play Program continue to develop andrelease innovative, timesaving data acquisition products that supporttransducer electronic data sheet (TEDS) smart sensors.
During the last 18months, this collaboration with vendors such as Honeywell-Lebow ProductsInc., Watlow and PCB Piezotronics has delivered more than 3,200 TEDSsensors and measurement systems that work with the IEEE 1451.4 standard.
The standard specifies technology that simplifies system setup and improvessensor accuracy by digitally storing sensor parameters on an embeddedEEPROM chip.“Since joining the Sensors Plug&Play Program, we now install TEDS in 90percent of our products,” said Kerby Hull, Regional Sales Manager with Honeywell-Lebow Products Inc., a leading manufacturer of torque sensing and force measurement equipment.
“We have shipped 3,000 sensors with TEDSinstalled and 3,500 sensors with Virtual TEDS, a trend that reflects thewider acceptance of smart TEDS sensors. We believe this growth is a directresult of the significant efficiency gains that engineers and scientistsachieve by combining easy-to-use, time saving plug-and-play sensors with high-quality data acquisition hardware.”
Engineers and scientists can see significant increase in productivity andfewer data entry errors by integrating TEDS sensors into theirapplications. TEDS-compatible hardware automatically read informationengineers and scientists once had to enter by hand – including sensor-specific scaling and calibration parameters as well as vendorinformation – directly from the sensor.
National Instruments LabVIEWsoftware was the first general-purpose application software to fullysupport the IEEE 1451.4 standard. By using the free TEDS library for theLabVIEW environment, more than 30 sensor vendors offering a broad range ofanalogue sensors now program their smart TEDS sensors in the samedevelopment environment, creating a common platform for the implementation of the standard.
Because sensors products created by Sensors Plug&Play Program members offertight integration with NI LabVIEW application development software,engineers and scientists not only simplify their hardware setup with TEDS but also streamline their software development.
Engineers using legacysensors can take advantage of smart sensors by downloading free “VirtualTEDS” files for use with LabVIEW software from an online library.