Arduino Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 11: Testing the new hardware

Today I’ll go through each part of my new Arduino shield to see if it performs as expected.

If you’re new to my Arduino-based ultrasonic wind meter project, you might want to click here for an overview: http://soldernerd.com/arduino-ultrasonic-anemometer/

When I first powered on the new shield, only two out of the four transducers worked. As it turned out, I had two different Direction signals on my schematic: one named DIR and one named DIRECTION. They should be one and the same signal but Eagle had no way of knowing about that so they ended up unconnected on the board as well. But luckily it was easy to fix with a piece of wire. After that, the circuit was quite ok. This was the first impression (with some comments of mine):

Overview of the circuit when first powered on

But let’s go through it step by step.

Amplifier

This was the main design flaw of the first version. Yes, it eventually worked but drew much more current than necessary. This one got the gain right the first time as can be seen from the screenshot above. Output amplitude was about 5.6V pp and the signal looked nice an clean.

So all I had to do was to tune the LC tanks to get them to resonate at 40kHz. The inductor has a 20 or even 30 percent tolerance rating and I can’t  measure it. So I had to start somewhere, see how it performs and adjust it from there. I started with a 15nF cap and used a signal generator to find the resonance frequency for each amplifier stage.

Amplifier stage 1 in resonance at 40.98kHz

 

Amplifier stage 2 in resonance at 38.78kHz

At resonance, the phase shift is exactly 180 degrees. Maximizing gain should give the same result but I found it easier to look at the phase shift. Above you see two screenshots: one with the first amplifier stage in resonance at 40.98kHz and one with the second stage in resonance at 38.78kHz.

From that you can calculate how much more or less capacitance you need. It took me 3 attempts to get it really right but the final result looks like this:

After some LC-tank tweeking the resonant frequency is at 40kHz now

Both stages are perfectly at resonance at 40kHz.

About the biasing: I’ve removed the 10k speed-up resistors R6 and R11. I guess they were unnecessary to start with and they lowered imput impedance too much. I noticed by the fact that there was a noticable voltage drop across the 100k biasing resistors R3 and R4. So while the emitter of the biasing transistor pairs was precisely 1V above ground as intended (I measured 1.015V), the actual amplifier’s darlington pair had it’s emitter only about 0.85V above ground. Not at all what I was looking for.

With the two resistors removed everything is fine. 1V emitter voltage for each of the four darlington pairs. And no measurable voltage drop accross the 100k resistors.

Zero Crossing Detector

Zero crossing detector at work

I had changed the comparator to a much faster type and this is the result.  Now it triggers exactly at the zero crossing, without any noticable delay.

Close up of the ZCD: Now it really triggers at the zero crossing

Before it triggered nowhere near the actual zero crossing because it always lagged behind so much. Now this problem is gone and the edges of the ZCD output are very clean and steep. If you zoom in even more you’ll see that  rise and fall times are only around 20ns and there is no overshoot and ringing.

ZCD: Nice, clean, fast edge

No excuses for the Arduino to not trigger accurately on them.

Envelope detector

The envelope before and after smoothing

I had changed the envelope circuit quite a bit. It has now two op-amp buffered low-pass filters. And this is what I get before the first stage (yellow), after the first stage (pink) and the final envelope (blue).

Envelope smoothing close-up

The first buffer has a gain of 2.5 set by the 15k and 10k resistors (R9 and R10). This has caused the op-amp to rail before the maximum amplitude was reached. I thought about reducing the gain but then decided to leave it as it is.

It doesn’t matter if we cut off the top of the envelope. All we care about is the rising edge, this is what we trigger on. We don’t care what happens after that. So the high gain gives us some more resolution in the area that we care about.

Capturing the rising edge of the envelope

I’m using the same fast comparator for the envelope detector as for the ZCD. And it works just as perfectly here. Above you see how it generates a perfectly clean output signal (pink) when the envelpe (blue) crosses the threshold (yellow).

As you can see, there is still a small amount of ripple in the envelope. I have set the -3db points of the filters quite a bit higher than in the first version: 15k plus 1nF results in about 10.6kHz. So I’m smoothing the envelope quite a bit less than I used to.

I might try increasing the 100k resistor at the input to maybe 150k. That would result in less saw-toothing at the filter input (ENV1 above). But for now I leave it as it is.

Signal routing / multiplexer

I’m now using the second, otherwise unused half of the 74HC4052 to route the PWM signal to the right buffer of the 74HC126. This works flawlessly.

What doesn’t work is routing the pre-biased received signals to the amplifier. Well, the signal does get to the amplifier but look at the shape of the amplifier input (yellow signal) in the overview screenshot at the very top. It gets pulled down to zero every time I change the input channel.

So I had to change that back to how it was in the first version. The unbiased signal goes through the multiplexer and  gets capacitively coupled into the amplifier where it is biased to the right level. But this time I don’t have the -5V supply at the multiplexer any more.

An unbiased 200mV signal passes the multiplexer without problem

Here I’m again using a signal generator to generate an unbiased sine wave with 200mV amplitude pp which is applied at the multiplexer input. As you can see above, it reaches the amplifier input in perfect condition.

Biased to -300mV it still works

Even when I biased it to -300mV it passed almost unattenuated. Only when I increased the biasing to -700mV, the amplitude was cut in half:

At -700mV biasing we lose half the signal amplitude

So I’ve replaced the four capacitors at the multiplexer inputs (C16, C24, C25, C26) with zero-ohms resistors and placed one of them at between the multiplexer and the amplifier input. For this second part I had to do a bit of surgery on the board but nothing major.

Now the amplifier input looks ok:

Amplifier input looks ok now

Crosstalk / Mute signal

I’ve eliminated two of the three multiplexers in this design and was prepared to get quite a bit of cross-talk because of that. This is why I planned ahead and included a mute signal that lets me mute both the amplifier input and output.

Not much of a cross-talk problem

As it turned out, there was not much of a crosstalk problem. Yes, the received signal does pick up some (around 100mV pp) of noise from the transmitted signal but it doesn’t do much harm.

Cross-talk zoomed in

Most of the noise is high frequency spikes and they don’t make it trough the amplifier. Apart from that: We are never transmitting and receiving at the same time. Note that the screenshots above are with the mute signal disabled. So I probabely won’t use that mute functionality going forward. One singal less to worry about. And if I change my mind the circuit is still there.

Temperature sensor / Voltage reference

Not much of a surprise here. I’ve measured the voltage reference output at 2.4989 volts, very close to the rated 2.5V and well within specs.

The temperature sensor also works like advertised. But It seems to be significantly (several degrees) warmer than ambient. I’ve used a thermocouple to measure the temperature of the sensor and the board around it and really found it to be several degrees warmer.

I have placed it a bit close to the LED which heats it up a bit. The orange LED I’ve used turned out to be very efficient so it was very bright with the 330 ohms resistor. I’ve changed that resistor to 1k now and the LED is still quite bright and only consumes a third of the power. But it didn’t help much as far as the temperature sensor is concerned.

Seems the heat is not mainly coming from the LED. Which brings us to the next topic.

Power consumption

I’ve measured the current (at 12V) the arduino was pulling at its DC plug. Since the Arduino is using a linear regulator, current should be independant of input voltage. Anything above 5V is just disposed as heat.

These are my results:

• Arduino + shield + display: 67.3mA
• Arduino + shield: 61.0mA
• Arduino only: 52.4mA

So the display is pulling 6.3mA and the shield another 8.6mA. Most of the current is used by the Arduino itself.

The power consumption of the shield makes sense: Every darlington pair is pulling 1mA, the LED uses about 3mA. Makes 7mA so far which leaves 1.6mA for everything else.

The Arduino is using quite a bit more power than I thought. At 12V this makes about 0.6 watts. Which is probably what’s heating up our shield and the temperature sensor with it.

Summary

I’m quite happy with the new shield. After a bit of soldering everything is working fine. So from now on, this will mainly be a software project. Here’s an update on that: http://soldernerd.com/2014/12/04/arduino-ultrasonic-anemometer-part-12-working-on-an-arduino-library/

Arduino Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 9: A new hardware

My first wind meter prototype is kind of working. The software will need improvement to make this wind meter into something really useful. But both hardware and software are basically functional and can be built up upon.

If you’re new here, you might want to check out the overview over this series of posts on the arduino-based ultrasonic anemometer: http://soldernerd.com/arduino-ultrasonic-anemometer/.

The new ultrasonic wind meter Arduino shield

The next thing I will do is re-design the entire hardware. Instead of two distinct boards with wires all over the place I will design a single, standard-sized Arduino Shield that can be stacked on an Arduino Uno. Just like any of those commercially available shields that add motor control, Ethernet or whatever. That will make the whole setup much smaller and simpler. And I hope this will also make it easier for others (like you?) who want to build their own.

This re-design is what I’m going to talk about today so I guess there won’t be much in the way of photos, just some schematics and board layouts. And I’ll put all the Eagle files on the overview page as a zip download. Here’s what I’ve changed and why:

Power supply

The first version used the (unregulated) Vin of the Arduino so it had a linear 5V regulator of its own. On top of that there was also a flying capacitor type inverter to generate a -5V rail for the analog multiplexer. Both of these chips have been eliminated. I’m now using the the 5V rail straight from the Arduino, there is just a 100uF tantal input cap. The -5V is no longer needed by the multiplexer. I’ll later explain why.

Signal routing / pulse generation / drive

The drivers are entirely new: I’ve replaced the two 74HC368 inverters with a single 74HC126 non-inverting line driver / buffer. It has four 3-state buffers, one for each transducer. The negative pin of each transducer is simply grounded in the new design. That costs us half the signal amplitude but simplifies things greatly. And our two-stage amplifier should have more than enough gain to make up for that.

As suggested earlier, there is only a single 74HC4052 left (instead of 3). We will get some crosstalk issues but we’re always transmitting or receiving, never both at the same time. Plus, the tuned amplifier filters out most of that high frequency stuff (such as square waves). And we have the option to mute the amplifier, this time both at the input as well as on the output. Not sure if we’ll need it, I’ll check once everything else is working.

Permanently grounding the negative pin of the transducers means we only have four signals to worry about. So I’m only using half of the 4052 to chose exactly one of the four signals. Y0, Y1, Y2, Y3 as inputs from the four transducers and Y as output that goes to the amplifier.

But why don’t I need the -5V anymore? Here is why. In my first design I routed the signal from the transducers straight through the 4052. Because this signal swings around ground, it will be negative half of the time and positive the other half. So I needed both a negative and a positive supply. Later, that signal was capacitively coupled into the amplifier where it was biased so somewhere around 2.3 volts. Now I already do the biasing before the 4052. So the signal will be positive at all times and hence there’s no longer a need for a negative voltage. I find this a really elegant solution, I just hope it will work 😉

There is still an Axis and Direction signal controlling a 74HC139 encoder generating the enable signals for the transducer drivers / output buffers. I had LEDs on these enable signals in the first version, these are no longer present. The software changes the axis/direction every 2ms so you won’t be able to see anything now.

The 74HC126 has active high enable signals (as opposed to the 125 which is otherwise identical). Since all but one enable signals are high, only one transducer can float freely. That’s our receiving transducer. That also means that the other 3 transducers are actively driven so only one of them must receive the PWM signal.

This is how I’ve solved this: As I said, I only used half of the 4052 for the tranducer signals. So the other half can be used to route the PWM signal from the Arduino to the correct output buffer. So the signal from the Arduino is connected to the input X and the outputs X0, X1, X2, X3 carry the signal to the different gates of the 74HC126. There is one potential problem: The outputs that are not selected are floating freely so there are 10k pull-down resistors on X0, X1, X2 and X3.

So from the 8 large ICs on the first version, only 3 are left. That saves plenty of board space so we can fit our circuit on a standard sized Arduino shield.

Same board from the other side

Amplifier

The basic design with two stages of tuned common emitter amplifiers with NPN darlington pairs has worked well so I’ll stick to that.

The main shortcoming of my first version was the 47uH plus 330nF LC tank (see part 4) so I’m changing that to 1mH plus 15.82nF. Same resonant frequency but much higher impedance. The inductor I’ve chosen has a dc resistance of a bit more than 16 ohms which will give a Q-factor of around 15 – comfortable for our application.

The main change is the biasing. A wind meter will be deployed outside so it is likely to see great variation in temperature. So the biasing of our amplifier and thus the quiscent current need to be stable over a wide temperature range. Two things make this a difficult task here: First, we’re using darlington pairs which means twice the variation in base-emitter drop. Second, our rather low operating voltage of 5 volts.

A common solution for difficult biasing situations is the use of a matched transistor to generate the base biasing voltage. And that’s what I’ll do here. Each stage has an additional darlington pair with collector and base connected for this purpose. So the collector will always be 2 diode drops (around 1.3V at room temperature) above its emitter. I want the emitter to sit 1V above ground and 1mA of quiscent current. So I add a 1k emitter resistor and a 2.7k collector resistor and get just that.

Base emitter drop will change by about -2mV per degree per transistor. So for a 50 degree increase in change in temperature, the drop accross our darlington pair will change from 1.3V to 1.1V – quite substantial. But quiscent current will only increase to 1.054mA and the emitter will then sit 1.054V above ground. A 5.4% variation for a 50 degree change in temperature. Not bad at all I think.

The last change to the amplifier is that I’ve put the gain limitting resistors (R7 and R12) in series with only the bypass caps (C5 and C10).  This will let me change the gain without affecting biasing which is given by R8 and R13.

Zero Crossing Detector (ZCD)

Almost no change here. I’ve only changed my comparator to be a Microchip MCP6561R. It has a worst-case propagation delay of only 80ns which is 100 times faster than the one I used last time. And it’s still cheap: CHF 0.43 at Farnell if you buy 10.

Envelope Detector

I told you earlier that I had some trouble with my last envelope detector which utilized a VCVS active low-pass filter. If I turned up the gain too much I got wild output swings. I found a screen shot of that:

Envelope going wild

Green is the amplifier output. We’re trying to get the envelope of that. But look what happens to the pink line when I turn up the gain. Nothing to do with an envelope. And I would like even more gain to make the envelope use (almost) all of the 0…5 volts range.

I haven’t really understood why that is. Suggestions anyone? The only thing I can think of is the rather narrow gain-bandwidth product of the op amp, 600kHz if I remember correctly.

So I’m using two op-amp buffers, each followed by a normal RC low-pass filter. So I can set any gain I want for the two buffers without affecting the signal shape. As an added benefit, I can now look at the signal after each buffer / filter. I’ve also changed the op-amps to be Microchip MCP601R. Less precise (we don’t need precision here) but fast (2.8MHz) and cheaper.

At the very input of the envelope detector I’m now using a second (not really matched but same type) diode (D2) to produce a bias voltage just a diode drop above ground to precisely compensate for the rectifying diode (D1) of the envelope detector.

The comparator at the output is now a MCP6561R as for the ZCD. Not that we need the speed here, just to use the same type.

Temperature measurement

Everything new here. LMT86 as a temperature sensor. Cheap, works from -50 to +150 degrees centigrade and is accurate to 0.4 degrees. Its output is between 1.5 and 2.5volts over the temperature of interest. It comes in a SC-70 package. That’s a bit small but still hand-solderable without problem.

There is no more op-amp to scale it up but I’ve added a rather precise 2.5V voltage reference, the ADR361. Quite an overkill maybe but I thought if you are measuring wind speed you are likely to also measure things like humidity, pressure, light intensity or something like that. So with the anemometer shield you get a precise and stable reference for all your measurements.

Summary

As you can see, I ended up changing quite a lot. When laying out the board I was surprised how easily everything fitted in. Not only did the fewer logic ICs save space themselves, it also greatly simplified signal routing. As you can see from the photos, I’ve already made a board. All the components have arrived as well so I’m ready to go ahead and build it up. I’m really looking forward to seeing how it will perform. I just hope everything works as planned.

All the board and schematic PDFs as well as the Eagle files can be found on the overview page as a .zip file: http://soldernerd.com/arduino-ultrasonic-anemometer/

That’s it for now, click here for the finished shield: http://soldernerd.com/2014/11/28/arduino-ultrasonic-anemometer-part-10-arduino-shield-ready/

Arduino Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 5: Testing the digital board

In the last post I went through the analog board and showed what I had to do to get it working properly. Today I’ll do the same whith the digital board.  Click here for an overview over this series of posts on the anemometer project: https://soldernerd.wordpress.com/arduino-ultrasonic-anemometer/

The corrected digital board

So I plugged in the board for the first time and everything looked fine. The power LED came on, both the +5V and -5V rails worked as expected. But not everything worked that well.

I’ve explained in a previous post how the Arduino can control the direction by means of two lines: Axis and Direction. Here’s the meaning of these signals (L=low, H=high):

Axis=L, Direction=L -> North to South

Axis=L, Direction=H -> South to North

Axis=H, Direction=L -> East to West

Axis=H, Direction=H -> West to East

The first thing these two signals do is to control 74HC139 address decoder. The 139’s enable signal is grounded so its outputs are always on. Depending on Axis and Direction the 139 turns exactly one of the signals North_EN, South_EN, East_EN and West_EN on. EN stands for enable. As the bar over the signal name indicates, these are active-low signals. So zero volts means on and 5V means off. Each of these enable signals is connected to an LED. The other side of the LEDs is connected (via a resistor of course) to +5V so the LED is on when the signal is on despite the fact that it is active low. This part also worked.

Then we have two 74HC368 hex inverters. If you look at the 368s data sheet you’ll notice that it consists of 6 inverting buffers. But there are only two enable signals. As with most enable signals, these too are active-low. One enable signal controls 4 of the inverting buffers while the other one controls only 2. For us, this doesn’t matter since we need a total of 4 groups (one for each transducer) of 2 buffers each (one for each transducer pin). So we’ll only use two buffers of each group no matter if there are four.

Each group is controlled by one of the enable signals coming from the 139. The North_EN signal enables the buffers of the group connected to the North transducers and so forth. So exactly one group of buffers is on at any given time. That’s the transducer that is transmitting. All 4 buffer groups are connected to the same PWM signal (named Signal on the schematic) coming from the Arduino. But since only one buffer group is on, only that transducer is actually sending. The other buffer outputs are off and their transducer pins can float freely. Notice how the PWM signal is connected to the input of only one of the buffers in each group. The output of that buffer ist then connected a transducer pin as well as to the input of a second buffer. So one pins of the transmitting transducer are always in opposite states. When the first one is high, the second one is low and vice versa. There were no surprises here, everything worked as expected.

How Axis and Direction control the 74HC139

Here’s a little visualization of the 74HC139 in action. Note the glitches in the West_EN and East_EN signals. The Arduino can’t change both Axis and Direction perfectly simultaneously, there will always be at least one clock cycle in between the two commands. That’s why those glitches happen. But Axis and Direction are changed between measurements so nothing interesting is going on anyway. No need to worry about this here.

But then there is the task of selecting the right signal to listen to. And that’s where I’ve messed up just about everything. I guess I just wanted to build my first prototype as soon as possible and didn’t double-check everything as I should have. I probably also tried to be clever and use as few signals as possible and chose my inputs so that it simplifies the physical routing on the PCB. Anyway, I ended up with a design that doesn’t work. So if you want to build this circuit, look at the RevB board and schematics where I’ve corrected the mistakes.

As explained before, there are three 74HC4052 multiplexers to eliminate crosstalk. Like the 139, the 4052s are controlled by Axis and direction. But watch out: You need to select the transducer opposite from the one that is transmitting. So for example Axis=L and Direction=L means North to South. North_EN is low so the North buffer group is on and so North is transmitting. That means we have to chose the South transducer for receiving. Nothing complicated, really. But you have to concentrate and think carefully about which transducer has to connected to which of inputs. There are multiple solutions that work but many more that don’t.

My working solution is as follows: IC5 selects between North and East. So North is connected to input 1 while East is connected to input 3. When we want to listen to North, East is idle and vice versa. That’s why we get rid of crosstalk. The negative output of IC5 is grounded, the positive one is named NorthEast and routed to IC6. The second multiplexer, IC7 selects between South on input 0 and West on input 2. Again, the negative output is grounded and the positive output named SouthWest is connected to IC6. IC6 then only has the simple task of choosing between SouthWest and NorthEast. That’s why I only needed my Direction signal to control this multiplexer. The other address input can be left grounded.

I didn’t bother building another board so I’ve just used some pieces of wire to correct my mistakes. The corrected circuit is equivalent to what you see on the RevB schematic and works flawlessly.

This was definitely not my most interesting post so far. Lots of text and much in the way of photos or screenshots. Analog circuits are usually more fun to work with I find. Next time I’ll connect the Arduino to my two boards and show you how they perform. There will be some photos and screen shots again, promise.

Click here for the next post: https://soldernerd.wordpress.com/2014/11/19/arduino-ultrasonic-anemometer-part-6-mechanical-design/

Arduino Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 2: Digital Circuit

I’m keeping my word and continue to document this project that I’ve been working on over the last two or so months. In this post I will talk about the digital part of the circuit.

Click here for an overview over this series of posts on the anemometer project: https://soldernerd.wordpress.com/arduino-ultrasonic-anemometer/.

Digital part of my ultrasonic anemometer. I’ve messed up some signals in Eagle and had to painfully correct this later.

What is this cirquit supposed to do? It has 4 ultrasonic transducers attached to it. At any point in time, exactly one of them will be transmitting while the one accross from it will listen and receive the signal. For example, if the North transducers is sending then the South transducer needs to be listening. The other pair of transducers just sits there idle.

The signal to be sent is a series of PWM pulses with a frequency of 40kHz and a duty cycle of 50%. This signal will come from the Arduino, the circuit here just needs to route it to the correct transducers.

For the receiving transducer, one leg needs to be grounded while the other one must be allowed to float freely. The signal on this floating leg is what you are receiving. So this received signal needs to be routed to the analog part of the circuit where it will be amplified and processed. Here, we don’t need to worry about this yet, we just need to make sure, the signal is as strong and clean as possible. That means we will have to protect it from the much more powerful PWM signal.

The Arduino needs some way of telling this cirquit in which of the 4 possible directions to measure. I thought the easiest way of doing this is by means of two signals: Axis and Direction. Axis determines if we are dealing with the North/South or East/West axis. The Direction signal then determines which side is transmitting and which one is receiving.

Power supply: LM2931 on the left, ICL7660 on the right.

But let’s start at the beginning. Most of the board is powered from a +5V rail but the multiplexers (more on them later) also need a -5V supply to do their job. So I’m using a linear regulator to make +5V from the Arduino’s Vin voltage. Vin is the voltage applied to the Arduino’ s DC jack.I’m using an LM2931 (pin compatible with the 7805) but you could use anything really. I then feed my +5V to a ICL7660 (the Microchip version of the 7660 but again, you could use anything) to get a -5V rail as well. Since the load on the -5V rail will be minimal I didn’t bother using tantalum caps but just used 10uF ceramics.

Close up of the rat’s nest to correct for the messed-up signals on the PCB. The technical term for this is ECO: Engineering Change Order.

The transducers are driven by a pair of 74HC368, a classic hex inverter with tri-state outputs. This last part is important because like I said, we need to let the receiving transducer float freely (at least one leg), otherwise it won’t be able to receive anything. The inverting nature of this chip allowes us to generate a 180 degrees out-of-phase PWM signal easily. So when transmitting, one leg is always high while the other one is low and vice versa.

The buffers are enabled by a active low enable signal. So when the respective enable signal is low, the output buffer is on and the transducer can send. When the enable signal is high, the output buffer is off and the pins can float freely.

On the receiving side I’ve used three 74HC4052 multiplexers. They allow you to choose 1 out of 4 signal pairs and connect them with a common pair on the other side. Two address pins are used to decide which of the 4 pairs to connect. For this we can just our Axis and Direction signals from above. The 4052s can be turned on and off just like the 368s but we never need to turn them off so we can just ground the enable signal.

We have four transducers and the 4052 can handle 4 pairs of input signals. So yes, we could just use one. But there would be cross-talk from the (powerful) PWM signal to the (weak) received signal. So the solution is to cascade 3 of them in such a way that the receiving and transmitting signals never meet. So you can’t put North and South on one multiplexer (mux) and East and West on another. That won’t help. You have to include one from each axis so one of them is always idle.

I think once everything works as supposed, cross-talk won’t be a problem since we will stop sending before the signal arrives at the receiving transducer. But this is just a prototype anyway so I don’t mind some overkill that will probably save me some hassle during the testing/debugging phase.  This way I can send and receive endless PWM signals (and not just bursts of them) while tuning the amplifier for example. But I’m planning to just use one in the next version.

Note that I’ve grounded one pin of the output signal on the first two multiplexers. So when I choose a transducer to receive, one of its legs is automatically grounded while the signal on the other one is routed to the 3rd and final mux.

There is one final thing to watch out for with these multiplexers: They have two supply rails (plus ground) and the signal you want to pass through the mux has to lay between those supply voltages at all time. In our case, the received signal will oscillate around zero volts so it will be negative half of the time. That means we need to provide a negative voltage as well. That’s why we need the -5V rail. It’s not exactly elegant having to generate a negative voltage just for that but the way the circuit works it is needed. In the next version I will probably bias the input signal to oscillate around some positive voltage so I won’t need the -5V any more.

LEDs are connected to the enable signals to show which way we are currently measuring.

If you have studied Carl’s circuit (highly recommended), most things will look familiar to you up to here. I’ve drawn my own schematic and have done some things somewhat differently but the general idea is really similar. Supply rails of plus/minus 5 volts, a pair of 368s to drive the transducers and cascaded 4052s to route the received signal.

Now there are two things where I’ve changed a bit more. The first is this Axis/Direction approach so I only need two control signals from the Arduino. It saves some pins on the Arduino and simplifies the software. If that’s necessary depends mainly on what else you want the Arduino to do. Carl has used a dedicated Atmega328 rather than an actual Arduino so there are plenty of I/O pins that serve no purpose otherwise. My goal is to (one day, hopefully) build a standard Arduino Uno shield that you can just stack of your Arduino Uno board. So who knows what other tasks that Arduino has to accomplish. That’s why I thought it wise to keep the task as simple and use as few pins as possible. The downside is that I had to use an 74HC139 to decode the Axis/Direction signal and generate the individual enable signals for the 368s. While I was at it, I decided to attach an LED on each of the enable signals. So you can see from where to where you are currently measuring. The final software will probably change that every few milliseconds so you won’t be able to tell anything but for testing and debugging I thought it might help.

One last thing that I’ve added was an NPN transistor that grounds the output signal to the amplifier when turned on. So with an optional mute signal I can turn the output off. Not sure if I will really use it. It’s completely optional but I’m already thinking about the next version and as I’ve mentioned I only want to use a single multiplexer. So I’m thinking about just grounding the output signal while transmitting pulses. A poor man’s RX/TX switching of sorts…

Here are the schematic and board layout as PDFs. I’d be happy to share the Eagle files as well but so far I haven’t managed to upload them here. Only a few file types are allowed here it seems. But let me know and I’ll send them to you.

This is what I’ve built so the errors are still there: digital_RevA_Schematic, digital_RevA_Board

This is the updated version (but I’ve never built one): digital_RevB_Board, digital_RevB_Schematic

Wow, this post got way longer than I ever thought.  Here’s the link to the next post where I talk about the details of the analog circuit: https://soldernerd.wordpress.com/2014/11/16/arduino-ultrasonic-anemometer-part-3-analog-circuit/