ANY-maze Help > I/O devices supported by ANY-maze > Legacy I/O devices > The ANY-maze interface (AMi) > The AMi ports > The AMi sensor ports

The AMi sensor ports

Introduction

An AMi includes two sensor ports which can be used to connect AMi sensors to the device. At present, there are two sensors available - a Temperature sensor and a Light sensor.

Connecting sensors

The AMi sensors are supplied with a connector which simply plugs into one of the sensor ports - it doesn't matter which. In fact, inside AMi the two ports are connected together, because the sensor ports are actually part of a simple network - see figure 1, below.

Figure 1. An example of how AMi sensors can be connected together in a simple network.

As can be seen in the above figure, sensors can be connected together to form a network so although AMi only has two sensor ports, you can in fact connect up to 8 sensors to one AMi device. To build a network, you can use the AMi sensor cables which consist of a 'Y-cable' and an 'extension cable'.

Although the network can be built in a fairly free form style, there are some good practices which you should try to adhere to:

Configuring sensors

Every individual AMi sensor includes within it a unique ID (it's built in during manufacturing) and this allows you to know which sensor is which - so which temperature sensor is in Animal Box 1, which is in Animal Box 2, and so on.

However, these IDs are rather technical, being something like DC980A42 which makes them rather hard to work with. To address this, you can use the AMi Sensor configuration window to give the sensors more meaningful names. For example the sensor in Animal Box 1 could be called 'Box 1'; the one in Animal Box 2, 'Box 2' and so on.

The AMi light sensor is a hand-held device which includes two buttons, one labelled LUX and the other TEMP. As you might expect, when you press the LUX button AMi will record the light level that sensor is registering, but what about when you press the TEMP button? As can be seen in figure 1, a sensor network can include many temperature sensors, so ANY-maze needs to know which of these sensors it should register when the TEMP button is pressed, and this is something else that can be configured using the AMi Sensor configuration window. In the above example, you would probably choose to specify that the temperature sensor in the water-maze is the one that should be registered when the TEMP button is pressed - thus you could hold the light sensor over the maze, let the temperature sensor fall into the water,and then press LUX to read the light level over the maze and TEMP to read the water temperature.

Using sensors

ANY-maze provides a number of ways you can use sensors:

Sensor specifications

AMi light sensor specification:

AMi temperature sensor specification:

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ANY-maze help topic T1174