If all we had to do to a sensor output was amplify it, sensor interface design would be fairly straightforward. For some sensors (e.g. the dynamic microphone in ELEC 241) voltage amplification is all that's required. But for many (e.g. the carbon button microphone in ELEC 241) there's no voltage to amplify until we incorporate the sensor into a circuit.
A better title for this exercise would be "Sensor Interface Circuits, Signal Conditioning, and Dynamic Range Optimization, Using only a Single Power Supply." That's a lot of stuff to pack into a single exercise, or indeed into a single course, so we will touch on only a few topics / try to get as much as we can out of a few examples We also have our ongoing goal of extending our PC board layout and fabrication skills to consider, so that will have to find its way into one of the examples as well.
Just in case that's not enough, we will also advance our skill as MSP430 programmers by including in interrupt driven program in another of the examples.