Outline the steps involved in transferring acquired data from the sensor to storage.

Question

Accepted Answer

## Data Transfer from Sensor to Storage

```mermaid
flowchart LR
  A[Sensor] --> B[Signal conditioning]
  B --> C[Anti-aliasing filter]
  C --> D[Sample and hold]
  D --> E[ADC]
  E --> F[Microcontroller]
  F --> G[Processing and time stamp]
  G --> H[Storage: SD card or memory]
  H --> I[Transfer to PC]
```

### Steps
1. **Sensing:** the transducer converts the physical quantity into an electrical signal.
2. **Signal conditioning:** amplification, filtering, isolation and linearization.
3. **Anti-aliasing filtering:** removes frequencies above $f_s/2$.
4. **Sample and hold:** keeps the value constant during conversion.
5. **Analog-to-digital conversion:** produces a digital code.
6. **Reading by the microcontroller:** over the internal bus or SPI/I2C.
7. **Processing:** scaling to engineering units, calibration, averaging, threshold checking.
8. **Time-stamping:** RTC adds date and time to each sample.
9. **Storage:** written to SD card, EEPROM or Flash in a file format such as CSV.
10. **Transfer:** sent to a PC or cloud over UART, USB, Ethernet or wireless for analysis.

### Exam tip
A numbered list of these steps with the flowchart is enough for 7 marks.

Data Transfer from Sensor to Storage

Steps

Exam tip

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