‘Sensors’ has always been a huge category for ipXchange, so in principle, you might think this would be a difficult one to judge for 2023. Not this time!
You engineers have voted with your projects, and the demos we did at SENSOR+TEST certainly secured this company as one of the most fun contributors to ipXchange’s content in 2023.
ipXchange’s winner of best sensor discovery in 2023 is ScioSense’s ENS161 digital metal-oxide multi-gas sensor, which, amongst other things, presents a marked improvement of the previous ENS160 by slashing the current draw to 700 μA in low-power mode, which is pretty cool for a hotplate-based gas sensing method – all puns intended.
Moreover, on-chip intelligence and pre-calibrated algorithms for temperature and humidity compensation greatly reduces the processing requirements of the external MCU at the heart of your build. This makes for significant memory, energy, and space savings as there is no need to load specialist software libraries onto a chunkier microcontroller, which means your end product can be smaller or more highly integrated.
In terms of the gas sensing capabilities, the ENS160 can measure total VOCs at 1-ppb resolution up to 65,000 ppb (including ethanol, toluene, hydrogen, and oxidising gases), equivalent CO2 at 1-ppm resolution from 400 to 65,000 ppm, and provide an AQI-UBA air quality index rating from 1 to 5. We can only assume the ENS161 improves on this. Not bad for only 3 x 3 x 0.9 mm!
But it was the demo with Rolf and a spray bottle of ethanol at SENSOR+TEST that secured this victory. In fact, all of the demos on ScioSense’s stand were incredible, so we at ipXchange think ScioSense could have won this award on that merit alone, but the ENS161 wasn’t the only device from this company that got you engineers excited, so it was a no-brainer that they would win the category.
Learn more about the ENS16X products by following the link to our board page, and get inspired for your upcoming projects in 2024. We’d love to facilitate your journey with ScioSense’s evaluation board, which can be split in the middle for remote testing of the sensor.
Keep designing!