Solution

Long-term measurement

In automotive sensor technology PSI5 sensors are subjected to long-term measurements in a climate chamber to test their long-term and temperature stability. The Simulyzer-RT system is more suitable than the PSI5-Simulyzer for high volumes, since other interfaces can also be tested simultaneously due to the modular structure and the Simulyzer-RT has more sensor interface slots.

Long-term measurement in practice

Typically, multiple sensors to be tested are placed in a climatic chamber and operated there for days or weeks. During this time temperature cycles are run. The sensors have to send plausible data during the whole time. Since this would involve a huge amount of data, there is the possibility to reduce the data.
On the one hand the sensor signals can be reduced to statistics, but on the other hand they can be monitored for upper and lower limits. Single bit signals are specified by means of bit mask and bit setpoint.The duration of the statistics can be configured from the seconds range to the hours range.

The collected statistical data contains:

  • Number of measured value samples
  • Mean value
  • Standard deviation
  • Min- and Max-value

If a sensor signal violates the configured limits, a real-time snapshot is taken with configurable duration of the data before and after the trigger. In addition to the actual sensor data, the sensor supply voltages, the sensor supply currents, analog reference signals and the temperature of the climate chamber can also be recorded.

An example of use

Seskion offers for this kind of application on the one hand an API library and on the other hand a complete Windows application.
Possible types of sensor interfaces:

  • SPI
  • PSI5
  • SENT
  • DSI

DThe API is available as ANSI-C(++) and .NET API (C# …). The Windows application also allows long term measurements with configurable power-on and power-off cycles.