The Sensor is based on their well proven ultrawide sensing technology as used in places like Lenovo’s high end laptops. The new sensor can be used to wake up devices such as appliances, information screens, or vending machines. It is 12 millimeters long and 12 millimeters wide. This new Proximity Sensor saves power and extends operating life. It also makes the device it is in feel more interactive which improves the user experience.
This Sensor is designed to detect device users who approach the device. These detections are very fast and reliable. The Sensor will also avoid false detections from large targets outside the radius of the device.
The new Sensor module contains all the hardware components and is very easy for the designers to integrate. It takes care of all the required signal processing and can report Sensor output.
The module is assembled using standard SMT (Surface Mount Technology) and reflow processes, which minimizes integration cost and time.
The X4103 module comes pre-certified. The output presence / No presence is over 12C, SPI or GPIO.
The new proximity Sensor leverages Novelda’s well established leadership in ultrawide sensing.
The third generation radar system chip the X4 is at the heart of it all. The radar transmits very short pulses that are reflected from the target and picked up by the receiver. The received echoes from a user are sampled extremely fast. There are roughly 23 billion samples per second. This means that the Sensor can decide how far out it wants to detect targets and stop sampling when the returning echoes have traveled a distance corresponding to the desired range. As a result even very large targets further out will have no impact on the detection process. The Sensor can easily separate targets inside the detection zone from targets outside.
The field of view is wide and stable and even though the signals are only a fraction of the strength of the bluetooth connection, they easily penetrate clothes and other non-conducting material. The Sensor will reliably detect the person regardless of what they are wearing, what the lightning conditions are like, and from which direction they approach from. Plastic or glass casing will not cause problems and no holes or lenses are needed. This leaves the designers with more freedom as to how they want the product to look.
As a customer all you need to decide is how far out you want to detect the user, and how sensitive you want the sensor to be within the detection zone. The customer will also need to decide how long they want to record presence after the last detection has occurred.
The sensor can be used with almost any 8-bit or higher host MCU and only requires about 8K of flash and 1K of RAM.
Visit https://Novelda.com/products/ to register for samples and learn more about the new Proximity Sensor.