Piezoelectric Ribbon Sensor - 2 feet / 600mm long
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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 moved 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 moved 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!
