A new industrial grade Geomagnetic Sensor Suite for use in critical applications has been released by Willow Technologies. The company advises the geomagnetic 
sensor features a high resolution and low-noise which is able to provide accurate measurement of signals: <10 nT which is claimed to be less than 0.1percent of Earth’s magnetic field. Ideal for applications requiring absolute heading or orientation data, including augmented reality and location tracking.
The device is built around PNI Sensor Corporation’s magneto-inductive technology, allowing these tiny sensors to deliver high performance resolution and repeatability with extremely low noise. This offers both high gain and high sampling rates and importantly, no hysteresis. These heading sensors also do not require any temperature calibration or current ‘set and reset’ pulses before each measurement.
Martin Pearce, Marketing Director, at Willow Technologies commented “The RM3100 delivers more than 20x higher performance than existing micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) or Hall Effect sensors. Its improved performance is due to a new and improved ASIC, the MagI2C and offers both SPI and I2C interfaces for easy integration in a wide variety of systems.”
This latest addition to PNI’s portfolio of geomagnetic sensors includes three of PNI’s newest magneto-inductive sensor coils as well as its new ASIC drive circuitry. It is said to deliver improvement in gain, resolution and power consumption, with added flexibility of both SPI and I2C interfaces. It is claimed to use PNI’s proprietary technology to provide over 23 times better resolution and 27 times less noise than commonly used Hall Effect magnetic sensors. These are critical attributes for accurate absolute orientation in a wide variety of applications.
Geomagnetic sensors are used to measure the Earth’s magnetic field to provide absolute reference and heading. But a large challenge is the changing magnetic fields that temporarily distort the heading information, such as metal parts in furniture, a passing car, or nearby mobile phones and computers. Compensating for these and other transient magnetic anomalies requires the geomagnetic sensor to be able to precisely distinguish between sensor noise (blur) and real changes in magnetic field. PNI’s geomagnetic sensors lead the field in their ability to reduce blur to establish the true magnetic field, outperforming other magnetic sensors by orders of magnitude.
It is not surprising that this patented technology has been proven across a wide spectrum of applications, including motion tracking, compassing, game, TV and set top box controllers and magnetic field measurement”, continued Pearce.
“This Geomagnetic Sensor Suite introduces a level of precision and performance for consumer applications, that was previously only available for advanced industrial applications such as advanced robotics, SONAR targeting and oceanographic & terrestrial mapping.” Concluded Pearce.
Willow
