Smart transducer

A smart transducer is an analog or digital transducer or actuator combined with a processing unit and a communication interface.

As sensors and actuators become more complex they provide support for various modes of operation and interfacing. Some applications require additionally fault-tolerance and distributed computing. Such high-level functionality can be achieved by adding an embedded microcontroller to the classical sensor/actuator, which increases the ability to cope with complexity at a fair price.