Data Logging Goes Wireless

There is no doubt that the growth of Bluetooth over the past five years has been phenomenal. However, most consumers still think of Bluetooth as being a wireless communication medium used by mobile phones to talk to headsets. Although this is still largely true, Bluetooth is finding its way into more routine forms of communication like industrial data logging.

This technical white paper describes such an application and details the design of a Bluetooth data logger that takes data from an austriamicrosystems AS1530 12 bit analog to digital converter (ADC), via a microcontroller and a Bluetooth link to a PC waiting to collect the data in a spreadsheet. The trend in industrial process control has been to reduce the communications wiring across a plant with parallel data paving the way for serial 'Profibus' data. This design extrapolates that trend and completely removes the communications wiring.