Not your usual PIR sensor – playing with ZDots

jafoca | April 18, 2009

I made an order a while ago from DigiKey. I got some basic electronics prototyping stuff as well as a few sensors and LEDs t play around with. One of the more interesting things I picked up was a Ziglog ZDots PIR sensor (click to view datasheet).

Zdot computer board arduino

Now this is not the usual PIR sensor that everybody in the arduino community usualy uses, that would be the parallax sensor from SparkFun.
This sensor, from what I saw, has a couple of distinct advantages over the SparkFun sensor:

  1. It is less expensive than the SparkFun sensor ($2-3 woohhoooo!)
  2. It operates in dual modes, hardware (digital) or serial mode – in which it accepts all kinds of advanced commands
  3. I like to be different – the sparkfun sensor has been done before…

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