Developing Software-Based Plug&Play Capabilities for Analog Sensors over a Network Using a Microcontroller Development Board

The present paper describes a standard C algorithm (mathematical equations + software implementation) for making analog sensors Plug & Play over TCP/IP - Ethernet protocol. This algorithm represents a beginning step for creating a prototype of smart transducer system according to IEEE 1451 family of standards. The sensors are connected to the Analog Input Ports of a microcontroller (MCU) development board. The standard C program running on the microcontroller will automatically detect the connected sensors and will send a list of sensor information over TCP/IP - Ethernet to a remote location. The MCU algorithm is able to detect when a sensor is connected to any of its I/O Analog Ports by monitoring some external and internal parameters like: the default I/O port voltage value, the voltage value of a port when a sensor is connected to that port, the influence between analog ports when connecting a sensor to a port. The microcontroller development board is partially programmed to be an HTML Web Server. In a Web Browser will be displayed the status of all Analog Input Ports. When a sensor is detected, a text file containing sensor data will be created on a local micro-SD card (data logging capabilities). The sensor data can be accessed through a Web Browser by using the IP address of the Web Server.