A Technique for Adapting a Quasi-Digital Photodetector to a Frequency-to-Digital Converter

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have been developed worldwide and new technologies are naturally being part of them. Meteorological electronic instruments in ITS applications must fulfil with low cost, low power consumption, size saving and wireless communication. The use of quasi-digital sensors and frequency-to-code converters helps to improve those features, but challenges in the measurand-to-code conversion are appearing in this type of systems. The specific case of adapting the output of a sensor for infrared (IR) light detection based on a quasi-digital photo detector is presented in this work. A low relative error of 10% under both indoor and outdoor conditions was determined. The result obtained suggest that this novel proposal may be used to assess the performance in visibilimeters, transmissometers, rain detectors, and current weather instruments used in ITS applications.