Exposed: HiTechnic Barometric Sensor

What’s this?  Two Exposed posts in two days?  What is this madness?

To be honest I’ve been wanting to cut HiTechnic’s new Barometric Sensor open since I got it a while back.  I held off while it wasn’t on sale yet since I couldn’t really write about it anyway.  However, now that it’s out there in the wild and I was opening up other sensors and had the light box out, I thought, “Why the heck not?”.

View from the top	View from the side

If you look at the pictures, you can clearly see the barometric sensor at the front and the small microcontroller to the left of it. Like most of their other NXT sensors, they’re using a small PIC microcontroller to read the actual pressure and process the data.  The small hole must be to allow the sensor to measure the pressure without exposing the sensitive internal membrane to pokey things and dirt.

I love seeing what’s inside these sensors, they’re always so neatly arranged and compact.  It must be quite a challenge to have to work with such restricted dimensions to make it fit inside the proper NXT sensor casing.