Over on Hackaday, I recently did a course with HackadayU about Embedded Serial Buses. We covered I2C in detail, and one of the things I was looking for were good, readily available I2C sensor breakout boards. Well, Celtic Engineering has just added a bunch of excellent breakout boards to their store, including the above High-Side Current Monitor which uses a Texas Instruments INA138; a chip I’ve worked with before that is easy to use and quite accurate.
An integral part of any power supply is current monitoring, and using a board like the INA138 can make your design more robust and reliable by monitoring for overcurrent conditions; or, switching taps on a transformer to maintain the most ideal efficiency of your switching converter. This small breakout board has a couple extra little features as well — a 15.4 kHz antialiasing filter feeds a 12-bit ADC which enables you to also monitor the voltage of the source, meaning power measurements are easily done.
Besides this current monitor breakout, Celtic has also added a I2C Pressure Sensor Breakout, an I2C 12-Bit DAC Breakout, I2C Humidity Sensor Breakout, and many more! These breakout boards are super useful to have in your parts bin. When an idea strikes, having easy-to-use breakout boards can make prototyping so much faster. These boards use commonly available parts that are likely to be available in mass quantities when you want to take your design to production. Breakout boards that use less common parts (something I’ve run into before) can add an extra hurdle when you realize they aren’t available or are difficult to find in large quantities.
Be sure to check out the Celtic Engineering Tindie Store to see their full offering of breakout boards!
