Renesas — Multi-Sensor Platform for ASi-5

Renesas has developed a reference design for a multi-sensor board which enables design engineers to evaluate sensors and a microcontroller which are connected via a standard ASi-5 interface.

This new reference design is intended for use in combination with an ASi-5 slave board and an MCU evaluation board, providing a complete evaluation platform for an industrial sensor system.

The reference design includes multiple sensors for measuring gas or liquid flow, air quality, humidity and temperature, ambient light and time-of-flight. Switching between sensors is accomplished by actuating a DIP switch or in software.

The design also features a dedicated RA2A1 MCU, which offers a rich set of analog and signal conditioning features for interfacing effectively to sensors. The reference design’s RA2A1 MCU allows the designer to decouple analog processes and offload them from the host MCU, supporting pre-evaluation of the sensor data.

The reference design’s power supply provides a single 3.3 V or 5 V input, and can internally generate an additional power rail at 3.3 V or 5 V. 

Renesas supplies full documentation for the design, including schematics and layout. The design is supported by a suite of demonstration software including for an LED/parallel interface, simple slave and complex slave implementations of the ASi-5 interface, LCD interface, Bluetooth® interface, and MQTT messaging server operation.