Smooth out digital signal from SW-420 vibration sensor in order to record duration?

Question

I'm attempting to make a sensor that will record the duration and frequency of a pump going off. It always fires for at least 4 seconds, but the duration can be up to 7 days. The vibration sensor I have is a SW-420, which I think will work. I'm fairly new at this, and I don't mind figuring out the actual code myself, but I'm running into newb problems.

1. Should I approach this as an interrupt that uses a callback while loop, or would it be better to look at it as a typical debounce sub? Is there a better solution?
2. Since the duration can (very rarely) exceed running for more than a few minutes, I'm wondering if I need an RTC module. The time is not very important, it just needs to be "close".
3. The duration info will be fed to node-red via MQTT. I can count frequency in that system... I'm trying to decide if I should do remote frequency calculations, or try and wrap it into the firmware on the Arduino. Any suggestions for this?

Bonus points if I can accomplish this without any additional libraries. I'd love to put this on an ESP8266.

Thanks for your help, I appreciate it.

Answer 1

Should I approach this as an interrupt that uses a callback while loop, or would it be better to look at it as a typical debounce sub?

No. If you want to use interrupts then just record the start time on one edge of the signal and subtract it from the current time on the other edge (not sure which edge is which on that sensor).

Since the duration can (very rarely) exceed running for more than a few minutes, I'm wondering if I need an RTC module. The time is not very important, it just needs to be "close".

It depends how you define "close". An RTC can give you better accuracy over long periods, yes, and the Arduino struggles with > 49 days by itself.

The duration info will be fed to node-red via MQTT. I can count frequency in that system... I'm trying to decide if I should do remote frequency calculations, or try and wrap it into the firmware on the Arduino. Any suggestions for this?

What kind of frequency are you wanting? The frequency of the vibration itself, or the frequency at which some vibration occurs? If the former the sensor you have won't do the job - that just tells you when there is vibration above a certain threshold.

To sense the actual frequency of vibration you need a more hands-on approach by the MCU. Either use the raw HDX-2 vibration sensor as used on the SW-420 (that's the blue tube at one end), or do it properly and use an accelerometer which you sample over time and perform an FFT on the sampled signal to isolate the different frequencies.