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Wheatstone bridge amplifier

A project log for No battery NFC air pressure sensor

Measure tire or ball pressure with your smartphone

captmcallisterCaptMcAllister 08/05/2015 at 02:230 Comments

August 4, 2015: Because I can't find TDK sensors in stock anywhere (in fact, even the TDK website has a dead link under their pressure sensors), I'll prototype with the more expensive (and easier to solder) NPP-301. Digikey has plenty of these in stock for $10.49 each. Too expensive for high volume, fine for prototyping. I think it should work at the ~ 2 V supply from the RFID chip, since it's just a bridge.

The Wheatstone bridge output is unamplified, and will need to be conditioned for the ADC on the microcontroller. There's a nice TI app note on how best to do this:

http://www.ti.com/lit/an/sloa034/sloa034.pdf

For the purposes of what I'm doing, I think I can get by with one op amp. The bridge impedance of the NPP-301 is 5k. I think I can live with the nonlinearity of the single op amp, but I'll calculate this as I go along.

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