Rain sensor app note?

Hello HS,

  In the FDC1004-Q1 datasheet there is a reference to and block diagram for a rain-sensor application for automobile: www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/fdc1004-q1.pdf . 

And there is another E2E post addressing this application: https://e2e.ti.com/support/sensor/capacitive-sensing/f/987/p/412106/1646860 .  Finally, here's a great BLOG article on the subject, actually shows a typical sensor: https://e2e.ti.com/blogs_/b/thinkinnovate/archive/2013/09/18/rain-sensors-should-be-much-smaller .

And just for clarification, is the application to simply detect rain, or is it to measure the amount of rainfall?

~Leonard

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Hello Leonard,
there aren't much information in the d/s, E2E or the blog you mentioned.
I'm more interesting in what processing power you need for a rain sensor and if you can measure the capacitance directly with a MCU w/o FDC.

The application is a simple rain sensor (detection of rain) to control the sun marquee.

Regards, Holger

By "rainfall one" are you referring to a rain gauge for measuring rainfall?  So far I have not seen a Ref Design for either a gauge or a basic detector, but I'm wondering if we had a gauge, and we could discern a very small amount of water in the collector vial, we could use that as a basis for rain detection, yes? 

Two areas where I am looking are rain detector in an automobile application, and detector for automatic sprinkler systems.  So far nothing exact, even though I have looked at CAP-sense, IND-sense, mmWave.

~Leonard      

LeonardEllis said:

By "rainfall one" are you referring to a rain gauge for measuring rainfall?

LeonardEllis said:

I am looking are rain detector

I only search for rain detection for sun marquee. The amount of water is not interesting.