The sensing season

This week, Americans are getting ready to celebrate the national holiday of Thanksgiving, a day when we all head to the kitchen and focus on one thing — sensing.

After all, all good cooks know that the turkey won’t be ready until a meat thermometer stuck into the turkey’s breast shows a reading between 165° and 169°F. Of course, they’ll also want to use a good oven thermometer to be sure the cooking temperature is set at 325° to 350°F.

You’ll definitely want to be sure that you have fresh batteries in your image-sensor-based digital camera to record all the festivities, and it’s also a good time to check that both the smoke detector and the carbon-monoxide detector are in good working order, so as to be all set for the coming holiday season. Remember to take plenty of vitamin C, to ensure top performance of Thanksgiving’s most essential sensor — your nose!

Thanksgiving is only one event that makes a case for November as National Sensor Month. Another is the recently completed MEMS Congress produced by the MEMS Industry Group. This year, attendance was significantly higher than last, and many manufacturing attendees used the show as a venue for introducing new MEMS sensors. One of the most interesting events was the technology showcase, which presented a wide ranging group of new MEMS-based commercial products.

Over the course of this week, we’ll be adding videos from the conference as well as new MEMS products to our website, so be sure to stay tuned for the latest innovations.

So have a Happy Sensing Thanksgiving, and once the Thanksgiving bowl games are done but before the tryptophan sets in, come back here and see what we’ve been adding to the site.