Our customers have been happy with MC1509 force controller and we have had great time working with them. They shared great idea and feedback and we are thrilled to release our new data acquisition electronics for FSR force matrix sensors - MC1600.

MC1600, a successor of MC1509, is fully compatible with all sensors that are designed for MC1509.
MC1600 has many advanced features - elegant housing, higher measurement speed, improved accuracy, and reliable data transmission mechanism.
This product will be an ideal companion for industry engineers, academic researchers, and many other developers who need affordable FSR matrix sensing solution.

To know more about MC1509, please visit MC1600 product page.

In this post, we share Snowforce 3 video manual.
Snowforce 3 is Kitronyx proprietary software to handle force/pressure mapping data from Snowboard 2, MC1509, and MC1600.

Snowboard 2 supports FSR matrix sensor as well as popular single point FSR sensors.
This post describes how to measure data from single zone FSR sensors with Snowboard 2.

Snowboard 2 can gather data from 10 single point FSR sensors simultaneously.
Connect your sensors to Snowboard 2 as shown in the photo above.

Then you need to download and unzip FSR Monitor app in download page.
If you are not familiar with Snowboard 2, consult this document first.

​Double click 'fsrmonitor.exe'.

FSR Monitor will be shown as below. Click 'CHOOSE PORT' and select a port that your Snowboard 2 is attached.

Click 'START' and gently press sensors. You will see bar graphs changing.

Let's start logging to use FSR data later. Click 'START LOGGING' and click the same button just seconds after.
In data folder you can find CSV file. Open it with Excel or other application that supports CSV formatted file.

In CSV, measurement data is well stored and you can use this information for your future use.
​Enjoy it!

This video shows the sensitivity of 1610 sensor of Snowboard. As shown in this video, this sensor responds at 50g force.

We're finalizing our manufacturing process to release MC1509 force controller. This controller supports large sensors whose rows and columns are 48 and 48 respectively. It will take a little time to complete the whole processes. So, we first share our recent progress with regard to software side.

Kitronyx API is being continuously updated and now it supports MC1509 and compatible sensors. In the figures above, you can see screenshots of application written by using Kitronyx API. Our API support Python, C++, and Processing so you can freely choose your favorite development environment to develop your own force sensing applications.

In addition, Snowforce visualization software has been also updated to support MC1509 and large matrix sensors.

Amir Bolzman shared a very exciting work that transforms the Snowboard to a musical instrument. In this post, a tutorial to reproduce his work is provided.

Materials
To begin with you will need:

1 x Snowboard
1 x Matrix Sensor 1610
1 x micro USB cable

Step 1
Let's begin!

Connect the Snowboard to your PC. Be sure that you connect the Matrix Sensor 1610 to the Snowboard.
Download and install Cycling74's MAX software. You can download a trial version here.
Download and unzip Amir Bolzman's firmware and software here.


Step 2
Upload firmware to the Snowboard.

In the unzipped folder, go to SnowMax-master\SnowMax1610 to find and upload SnowMax1610.ino

PS: You can apply this tutorial to the combination of SBFSR10 and single zone FSR sensors.

Amir Bolzman shared an interesting project using the Snowboard. He transformed the Snowboard into a musical instrument by combining Max/MSP.

Thanks Amir!

In the previous post, we introduced 2D force pressure map for the Snowboard. This feature has been more improved to provide a beautiful visualization. Unlike previous mono colored map, we added a heatmap color scheme.

Snowboard can measure force map across an FSR matrix array sensor. This unique feature of Snowboard is very useful if you are interested in implementing a pressure distribution measurement system (a.k.a pressure mapping system).

By default, visualization software of Snowboard shows you 3D force map.

 However, you might need to get a 2D force map image. In this case, press '2' key, then the software changes its visualization mode from 3D to 2D force image.

If you feel that the 2D force map image is too weak, then use up/down arrow keys to control the image strength. Upper arrow key will strengthen the signal and the visibility of the 2D force map will be more improved.

Adding a single zone FSR (Force Sensitive Resistor) sensor is pretty simple thanks to the Snowboard's onboard force touch controller. This force touch controller is able to handle up to 160 single zone FSR sensors simultaneously with total scanning time less than 20 ms (120 us for each single sensor). This onboard controller always scan 160 sensing points when requested. However, in some case, you just want to use one or two FSRs and very fast response from them.

The easiest way to achieve this is to combine the Arduino and reference resistors in the Snowboard.
Let's first start with an example. Wire your FSR and the Snowboard as shown below.

It is convenient to use a small breadboard to implement the wiring above.

Then, upload the following code to the Snowboard.

Run Serial Monitor from Arduino IDE. Squeeze the FSR sensor. You can see that FSR reading is changed according the applied pressure. Speed of reading a single zone FSR sensor is at most 120 us which is quite fast enough for most applications (such as musical instrument).

Now we are in a position to know how it works. On the Snowboard, there are An pins which is part of Snowboard's connectors for force matrix sensors.

These pins are connected to 10 kOhm reference resistor as shown below.

According to the wiring above, an equivalent circuit is constructed as follows. D8 drives the whole circuit by applying 5V. Due to the serial connection of FSR and the 10 kOhm reference resistor, the applied +5V is divided across the two resistors, i.e. FSR and R1. The voltage acroos R1 is measured by A0 (analog input) pin of Snowboard whose value is

A0 (V) = 5 * R1 / (R_FSR + R1)

where R_FSR is the resistane of FSR sensor. It should be noted that this value is decresed according to the applied pressusre. When this voltage is measured by A0 (analog pin), this value is digitized between 0 and 1024. 0 and 1024 correspond to 0V and +5V, respectively.

Since there are six analog pins on the Snowboard, you can attach 6 FSR sensors with this approach. If you need to attach more FSR sensors, then use this method.