New ultrasonic MCUs and new reference designs make both electronic and mechanical water meters smarter. Source: Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments (TI) has revealed a new family of MSP430™ microcontrollers (MCUs) with an integrated ultrasonic sensing analog front end that enables smart water meters in order to deliver higher accuracy and lower power consumption. TI also introduced two new reference designs that make it easier to design modules for adding automated meter reading (AMR) capabilities to existing mechanical water meters.
The new MCUs and reference designs support the growing demand for more accurate water meters and remote meter reading to enable efficient water resource management, accurate measurement and timely billing.
As part of the ultra-low-power MSP430 MCU portfolio for sensing and measurement, the new MSP430FR6047 MCU family allows developers to add more intelligence to flow meters by taking advantage of a complete waveform capture feature and analog-to-digital converter (ADC)-based signal processing. This technique enables more accurate measurement than competitive devices with the precision of 25 picoseconds or better, even at flow rates less than 1 liter per hour. Along with this, the MSP430FR6047 devices reduce the water meter system component count by 50 percent and power consumption by 25 percent. This enables a meter to operate without having to charge the battery for 10 or more years.
The new MCUs integrate a low-energy accelerator module for advanced signal processing, 256 KB of ferroelectric random access memory (FRAM), a liquid crystal display (LCD) driver and a metering test interface.
For more information on the MSP430FR6047 MCU, visit TI.
