International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 21, 2002 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / Replacing and maintaining sensors in existing legacy systems is costly and time consuming since no information beyond voltage or current is supplied by these sensors. When a sensor is replaced or added, information for that sensor has to be incorporated by the software programmer into the main system software – a costly and time-consuming process. A method has been developed to give these old sensors the intelligence to meet the requirements of the proposed IEEE P1451.3 standard. This is accomplished with no changes to the legacy hardware and a minor, one time change to the legacy main system software.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 18-21, 2004 / Town & Country Resort, San Diego, California / The wireless sensor concept has been hindered in the past by the large number of components needed to add the wireless transceiver feature and the additional power consumption needed for that feature. This has been resolved by incorporating all the wireless components into a single, low power modular circuit. Intelligence is being added to legacy sensors to make them Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 1451.4 compatible with an element called a Sensor Identification Transducer Electronic Data Sheet (SITEDS), which contains the Transducer Electronics Data Sheet (TEDS) for that sensor. All the sensor interface parameters are automatically configured by a module called the Universal Smart Transducer Interface Module (USTIM) using the TEDS input from the respective sensor’s SITEDS. An IEEE P1451.5 compatible wireless interface can be incorporated into the SITEDS with the transceiver module giving the legacy sensor full wireless capability.