This thin silvery ribbon is an interesting sensor. It’s made of 2mm wide by 600mm long piezoelectric film sandwich. Piezo film can be used to detect motion or vibration – when shifted around or touched, it creates a small current pulse across the terminals. If a 1 Mega-ohm resistor is placed across the two terminals you will see the current converted into a voltage that can be read by an analog-to-digital converter (ADC).
Basically, connect one tab to ground, another tab to the ADC input of your microcontroller or ADC, and a 1M resistor across both, then read the analog input while touching/poking/twisting the piezo element and you’ll see little spikes of voltage whenever the piezo has vibrated. This Arduino guide shows a wiring and code example.
Usually, piezos are round hard disks, which is why we thought this thin and flexible version was interesting. There could be some unique sensing projects that need to sense over a long, flexible distance. Like perhaps a wearable project with a sensor sewn into clothing, or feedback for a robotic actuator. Initially, these were designed for sleep sensors, to be placed underneath a mattress to detect how much the sleeper shifted around through the night.
Comes with a dual metal contact tab with 0.2″ spacing between the two contacts, on one end. You can cut this down if desired but once cut you won’t be able to reattach!
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