What Are the Different Types of Electronic Sensor?

@nony - Sensors are everywhere. As an example, years ago I used to play a flight simulator game on my computer. Instead of using a regular joystick however I bought a game controller made specifically for flight simulation games.

What it did was translate my movements into movements that would be seen on screen. I guess it uses a tilt sensor of some sort. When I turn it, the airplane turns. This affects all the usual movements of the airplane, whether you are talking about a pitch, yaw or roll.

It would have been difficult to create a sense of realism by duplicating these movements with my joystick alone.

@SkyWhisperer - When I first bought my digital camcorder I wanted to test how well it performed in low light settings.

I was introduced to a new term – the “lux” rating. Apparently this is a rating that the camcorder uses to measure how well it does in low light.

It has a photo cell (or a bunch of photo cells for all I know) that enable it to adjust the shutter and aperture speed in various low light situations. I found that generally it did a good job, but in some situations the images were a bit grainy in low light.

The photo sensor doesn’t really control the ultimate quality of the image; it just makes adjustments so that you can capture as much of the image as possible, with the best clarity.

@everetra - We have a motion detector as part of our home security system and it works okay most of the time.

It uses infrared radiation to detect temperature differences between the environment, and that of a human body passing by. It works correctly most of the time, but if an object has the same temperature as the “default” environment temperature passes by, it won’t pick it up.

In other words, it doesn’t necessarily pick up inanimate objects. This is not necessarily a bad thing; the whole point is to identify real live intruders, after all.

But I had always thought that motion detectors detected motion, pure and simple, before I understood how they worked. They are more accurately described as temperature detectors in my opinion.

In high school I had this Casio calculator with a touch sensor keypad. It wasn’t a scientific calculator or anything like that, just a basic model.

But it had no buttons in the usual sense – the numbered keypad responded to touch. Sometimes this was good and sometimes it was bad. It required less force so it took less effort on my part to “punch” in the numbers for my calculations.

On the other hand, sometimes it was a little too sensitive and I would unintentionally enter in the wrong numbers. Also, as a touch sensitive keypad it was sensitive to dirt and smudge.

If you get too much of that collecting on it then it doesn’t respond as quickly, so you had to keep it clean. Still, it was kind of cool, and it was neat years later to watch science fiction shows where touch sensitive keypads were the basic mode of operation for all their control panels.