Working with the sensor database

DIRAC comes with a database of commonly used accelerometers, microphones and impact hammers that can be added to your project.  Here, we show how to work with the sensor database, such as adding new sensors to the database and using them in your project.

The sensor database in DIRAC contains a list of all the sensors that can be added to your project, and can be accessed by clicking on +SENSOR or by pressing D. DIRAC comes with a database of commonly used sensors, and you can also create your own.

You can click through the tabs to review the accelerometers, microphones, impact hammers, and custom sensors.

How to: Use sensor models and instances

Within the database, the bold-faced entries are sensor models which primarily contain information on the physical sensor dimensions and nominal sensitivities, and the light-faced rows show the sensor instances which include the serial number and calibration factors for specific sensors. I only recommend using sensor instances if you have a very limited number of sensors in your lab, otherwise it’s much more efficient to work with sensor models and set the specific calibration factors later on in Measure.

How to: Create instances and add sensors

If you want to create a new instance, you can easily do it like this, and now you see it in the list.

To add a new sensor to the database, press the plus button. Here, you can enter all the information for the brand, model, nominal calibration, and physical dimensions. To include this new sensor in your project, just click here, and drag it to where you want it to be placed on the geometry.

Then if you press the S key you can add the same type of sensor again, which should really speed up your test setup.

Whenever you add one of these sensors to your project, it actually gets copied into the project file. So when you share the DIRAC project with your colleague, you don’t have to worry about it congesting their sensor database.

How to: Work with microphones and impact hammers

The database also includes microphones and impact hammers. When I add an impact hammer, the physical hammer geometry doesn’t show up, as it’s not needed, but it does get included in this list of excitation sources. We can go to list mode to edit its name. And if we forget to include an excitation source, we will be reminded once we connect to the data acquisition system to start measuring. The hammer can also be added here, and again will show up in the list of sources. Separately, you want to define all the physical excitation points to be hit with the hammer.

Back to the database, we also have custom sensors that are again added with the plus button.

How to: Search and export

On any of these tabs, we can search for specific sensors. And of course, we can export our sensor database so that our colleagues can use it too, or import one you’ve received from a colleague.