Software Documentation: Air Mass Flow Sensor

This project contains the software for a student experiment at ETH Zürich based on sponsorship by Sensirion AG. The student experiment aims to illustrate the sensor principle of a thermal air mass flow meter, which is investigated mainly from the control point of view. The students are required to implement control algorithms for the regulation of the heater.

The software provided here mainly does two things:

  1. Communication with all attached devices:

    1. Sensirion SHT temperature sensors connected to a Sensirion Sensor Bridge

    2. A Sensirion SFM massflow meter

    3. A custom built heater being driven with a PWM signal

    This task is taken over by the Setup class. It handles all interactions with the hardware and for this purpose makes use of the different drivers, as seen on page Drivers.

  2. Allowing interactions:

    1. Displaying the current system status

    2. Walking the student through different steps of the experimentation

    3. Handling interactions with the setup

    These tasks are solved with a PyQt5 based graphical user interface as described in section GUI.

Troubleshooting

When experiencing issues with soft- or hardware consider section FAQ.

Acknowledgements

The icons in the GUI are made by Yusuke Kamiyamane and used under CC BY 3.0.

The GUI frontend, QT 5.0 is used under LGPL 3.0.