RUTRONIK SMART: World’s First Integrated Environmental Unit from Bosch
The BME280 Integrated Environmental Unit from Bosch Sensortec combines sensors for pressure, humidity and temperature in a single package. It was designed to support a broad range of emerging high performance applications, e.g. home automation control, indoor navigation, personalized weather stations and innovative sport and fitness applications. The BME280 is available at distributor Rutronik as of now.
With a small footprint of only 2.5 x 2.5 and a height of 0.93mm in a space-saving 8-pin LGA package, the BME280 sensor offers high design flexibility and is ideally suited for mobile devices with limited space such as smartphones, tablets, smart watches and electronic wristbands. Its very low current consumption of only 3.6µA at 1Hz makes the BME280 particularly suitable for battery-driven applications.
Thanks to three power modes and separately configurable oversampling rates for pressure and temperature measurement, the BME280 can be adapted to a wide range of use cases. The humidity sensor measures relative humidity across a wide temperature range from -40° up to +85°C with a fast response time of less than one second. The humidity measurement accuracy is ±3% with a hysteresis of 2% or better, and the temperature reading accuracy is within 0.5°C. The relative accuracy of pressure readings is ±0.12 hPA. As a result, the BME280 is ideal for enhanced high performance GPS applications where it can be used to achieve more precise and faster position determination.
The BME280’s pressure management is very stable over temperature: The low temperature coefficient of 1.5Pa/K translates into an altitude stability over temperature measure of 12.6cm/K. This precision along with its versatility and compactness, makes the integrated sensor unit ideal not only for innovative new applications but also to improve the exactness of existing ones. Thus, the sensor can for example be used to implement indoor climate control applications for smartphones. It allows altitude profiling to be integrated into sports applications, thus enabling better training performance monitoring. As a connected sensor in the Internet of Things, the BME280 enables a host of further applications in home automation, smart energy, smart transportation and elderly care.
