Arduino MPPT Solar Charger Shield – Software

There have been two previous posts on this project: one on the concept and the hardware and one on hardware testing. You probably want to check them out first if you’re not yet familiar with this project. Or even better: Click here for an overview over this project.

Maintaining an input voltage of 17 volts even if that means a lower-than-desirable voltage at the output

Now that we know that we have a functioning MPPT solar charger we are ready to talk about the software (or the sketch as the Arduino folks call it). It’s quite simple, really. So this will be a short post. And yes, you can download the sketch. There is a link at the end of this post. As always, I appreciate any feedback, comments and the like.

There is a number of basic tasks the arduino needs to perform in order for this shield to be useful. I’ll go through them one by one.

Controlling the DC-DC converter

At the heart of this project there is a synchronous step-down (or buck) DC-DC converter that is controlled by a PWM signal from the arduino. So one of the tasks is to set the frequency and duty cycle of that PWM signal.

We let the PWM signal run at the maximum frequency the arduino allows with an 8 bit resulution. Thats simply 16MHz (the Arduino’s frequency) divided by 256 (the 8 bit resolution), or 62.5 kHz. So the prescaler will be 1.

As you can see from the shields’s schematic, we need to output the PWM signal from Pin 6 (by the Arduino’s pin numbering, not Atmel’s). In order to do this kind of low-level stuff you’ll have to read the Atmega328’s data sheet. There is usually no Arduino-ish shortcut if you really need to controll what’s going on.

Luckily it’s just a few lines of code to set things up. All in the function buck_setup(). There are three more little functions to control the DC-DC controller once it’s set up:

buck_enable() and buck_disable() are very simple and just turn it on  and off, respectively. buck_duty(uint8_t duty) is only slightly more involved. It changes the duty cycle to the value you pass to it. Besides that it ensures that the duty cycle stays within certain limits.

Test setup with resistor-based dummy load

You don’t want it to go to 100% since in order to keep the bootstrap capacitor C6 charged you need a little bit of off-time. In order to drive the upper FET you need a voltage higher than the panel’s voltage and that’s exactly what C6 is for. So we enforce an upper limit on the duty cycle.

Likewise, you don’t want your duty cycle to go below 50% because in that case you would be pumping energy from the battery to the pannel. A synchronous step-down converter is basically the same thing as a synchronous step-up (aka boost) converter with input and output confused. So we also want to enforce a lower limit on the duty cycle.

The upper and lower limits are set through the #defines DUTY_CYCLE_MINIMUM and DUTY_CYCLE_MAXIMUM.

Measuring voltage and current

The shield has all the hardware necessary to measure both voltage and current both at the input as well as on the output. We’ll just need to write some simple software to make good use of that hardware.

Unlike with the PWM singal where we had to do some low-level bit fiddling ourselfs we can just rely on convenient Arduino library functions to do the job. Basically, analogRead() is all we need here.

Nicely regulating so that the input stays at 17 volts

I’ve written a function called read_values() that uses analogRead() to read all 4 values (input voltage, output voltage, input current and output current) 16 times each, averages the results and converts the ADC reading to proper voltages and currents.

The necessary multipliers are defined as floats in VIN_MULTIPLIER, VOUT_MULTIPLIER, IIN_MULTIPLIER and IOUT_MULTIPLIER. I’m doing all the voltage and current measurements in floating math. Yes, this is not at all efficient but we don’t need the Arduino’s computational power for anything else most of the time so this is fine here. Just keep in mind that you can save a lot of resources here if you ever need to do so.

Displaying voltage and current on the LCD

Our hardware also involves a 2 lines x 16 characters LCD so we can show the world what we are measuring. Again, we can rely on standard Arduino functionality to do the job. There is an LCD library that does everything we need.

So my function write_display() can focus entirely on formatting. The upper line shows the voltages in Volts, the lower line shows the currents in Milliamps. The input is on the left hand side of the display, the output on the right.

Deciding what to do

In the first section we’ve discussed the functions necessary to controll the DC-DC converter. But in order to use those functions, the Arduino needs to first decide what to do.

66% duty cycle at 21V input voltage gives the desired 13.8V at the output

This is where the function buck_update() comes into play. You could consider this the heart of this sketch. This is where all the relevant decisions are made. When to turn the converter on, when to turn it off, when to increase the duty cycle, when to decrease it… You get the idea.

The behaviour of buck_update() is controlled by 8 #defines. I list them here together with the values I have used:

#define ENABLE_VOLTAGE 18.0
#define DISABLE_VOLTAGE 15.0
#define INPUT_TARGET_VOLTAGE 17.0
#define OUTPUT_TARGET_VOLTAGE_LOW 13.8
#define OUTPUT_TARGET_VOLTAGE_HIGH 13.9
#define INPUT_CURRENT_LIMIT 2000.0
#define OUTPUT_CURRENT_LIMIT 3000.0
#define INPUT_CURRENT_MINIMUM 0.0

I think they are quite self-explanatory, especially if you look at how they are used inside buck_update. It’s quite simple: If the panel’s voltage rises above 18V, turn the converter on. Once the converter is on, try to archieve a panel voltage of 17V without exceeding 13.9V at the output. If the panel’s voltage drops below 15V turn the converter off again.

At 55% duty cycle with a 16.9V input voltage we’re getting only around 9.2V at the output

Besides that the function is also looking at the input and output current and makes sure certain limits are not exceeded. But with a 30W panel it should never be possible to reach those limits anyway.

Putting it all together

Now all we need to do in the loop() function is calling read_values(), buck_update() and write_display(). Since writing to the LCD is quite slow we are only doing it every 32nd time we read the values and update the PWM signal.

With this sketch I’ve hooked the MPPT Solar Charger up to my lab power supply. (a Keysight E3645A, my newest toy *g*) and my extremely simple but occasionally useful resistor-based dummy load.

The enable and disable voltages are simple and work as expected. Maximum output volage is also not tricky. If the voltage at the output goes too high, the duty cycle is decreased and everything is fine again.

There’s not much to photograph when you’re writing and testing software

More interesting was to see how the shield would regulate when faced with a limited current budget at the input. For that the supply was set to a voltage of 21V (about a 12V solar panel’s open-circuit voltage) with a current limit of 100mA to 500mA. That’s quite a nasty supply, quite a bit trickier to handle than a real solar panel. Try to pull just a bit too much current and the voltage will drop to zero…

Also, the resistors at the output are not a realistic load for the converter. A car battery will pull no current at 12 volts or so (unless overly discharged) but will quickly start to sink large currents when the voltage goes just a bit higher and the battery is charging.

But I think the setup is good enough to test the sketch. And it handles the challenge quite well. With all resistors on (i.e a 100/6 ohms load) and a 300mA current limit, the input voltage sits at 17V (our target input voltage) while 9.25V appear at the output. At 400mA, the output voltage rises to 10.7V with the input still at 17V. At 600mA the input is still at 17V but with the output now at 13.15V. If I take the current limit even higher, the output voltage rises to 13.82V but not any higher, just as we want. The input voltage rises to 21V (since this is a lab supply and not a panel) with a corresponding drop in current to 530mA.

Quite realistic: The charger is pulling as much current as it can with the current limit at 530mA and reaches an output voltage just above 12 volts

I’m honestly quite happy with the project as it is now. The idea definitely works and I’m motivated to design a new, deployable version with some fancy features that will use much less power at the same time. I’ve already done quite some work on that new version but it will take another few weeks until I get to describe that project here.

Until then I will show you some other, smaller projects that I’ve already finished but didn’t have time to document yet. So you will first see a number of smaller, simpler projects over the next few weeks.

Before I forget: There’s the Arduino sketch for download. And click here for an overview over this project.

Arduino MPPT Solar Charger Shield – Testing

First tests are being performed on the Solar Charger Shield

In my last post I’ve introduced a proof-of-concept Arduino solar charger shield. I went through the hardware as well as the way it works – or at least is intended to work. It was prominently linked on dangerousprototypes.com as well as some other sites and got quite a bit of publicity as a result. Thank you all for sharing this post.

By the way: here’s an overview over all posts on this project.

DUT hooked up to my Constant Current Dummy Load

This time I’ll show you some results of the testing that I’ve done. The basic test setup is shown above: The solar charger is hooked up to my home-brew constant current dummy load, together with a pair of DMMs at the output in order to precisely monitor output voltage and current. For the input I’m relying on the lab supply to provide these measurements. And yes, the shield does its own measurements of both input and output currents and voltages. Once calibrated they are even quite accurate but I won’t rely on them for things as calculating the converter’s efficiency.

Vin=17V, no load

But first we need to see if our converter works at all. As the scope screenshot above demonstrates – it does. For all the tests shown in this post, the input voltage was provided by a lab supply set to 17 volts. So we’re not yet testing the software and its capability to draw just the right amount of current.

Vin=17V, no load

As you can see, since the converter can draw any (reasonable) current at the input, it provides the maximum voltage (set in software) of 13.8V at its output. In order to do that, the upper FET is on approximately 80% of the time. The signals all seem nice an clean and there is no noticable ripple at the output at 1V/div and no load. And the switching frequency is 62.5kHz (16MHz / 256) as expected.

Vin=17V, Iout=1A

At 1 Amp output current, the software has to increase the duty cycle somewhat to 82% (above) and even further to 84% at 2A (below). Besides that, everything still looks very similar under load conditions.

Vin=17V, Iout=2A

In my last post I’ve raised the question if the FET driver’s dead time of 540ns according to the datasheet is not a bit excessive. Well, let’s look at the dead time on the scope. First of all we can observe that the dead time of the IR2104 is in line with the data sheet. I don’t have it in front of me right now to check the min/max specs but the measured 522ns seem reasonably close to the theoretical 540ns.

The IR2104 has a built-in dead time of 540ns according to the data sheet. We’re measuring 522ns here – close enough.

From looking at the screen shot above, the dead time does seem a bit long. The reason dead time is introduced is to prevent shoot-through. If both FETs are on there is a short-circuit from the input to ground. Together with the input capacity and the FETs low Rds-on, very large currents could flow, possibly destroying the FETs and at least detoriating efficiency. So introducing a bit of time when both transistors are off seems reasonable. But too much of it also costs efficiency since current has to flow through the diode instead of the lower FET. The main reason for using a synchronous topology is to prevent this in order to gain efficiency. So obviously one has to find a balance. I think here we’re a bit far on the conservative side but never mind for now.

Let some current flow

So now that our converter is working, let’s take a look at efficiency. I’ve measured the efficiency at output currents ranging from 100mA to 2.6A in 100mA steps with the input voltage at 17V. I didn’t use the sense-wires connections on the lab supply so I had to compensate for the voltage drop on the input leads manually.

There was a drop of up to 220mV on the input leads so the voltage reading of the lab supply is not quite accurate

The results are quite impressive:

• 95.5% @ 100mA (worst)
• 96.9% @ 200mA
• 97.9% @ 400mA
• 98.1% @ 800mA (best)
• 97.1% @ 1600mA
• 95.7% at 2600mA

So the efficiency is constantly at a very high 95.5% and better over the entire current range of interest.

This little dummy load is really useful

The resulting loss is less than 1.6 Watts @ 2.6A out. As a result, the shield never gets hot, even when running at this power level for a while.

Note that this is quite a bit more power than the converter was designed for. 37W as opposed to the 30W I designed it for. The FETs could even handle much more. The limiting factor would likely be the coil reaching saturation. Unfortunately my lab supply doesn’t supply any more than 2.2A so I can’t push it any further.

Shield performs well even beyond 30W spec

 

One thing to note is that these efficiency figures don’t take into account the power consumed by the arduino, the display, the fet driver, current monitoring ICs and so on. This brings us to the last topic for now: The current consumed by the various components. I did these measurements mainly in order to understand how to limit power consumption in a later version. To me, this shield is only a proof of concept and so reducing power consumption was never an issue.

Basic test setup

Here are the results:

• Arduino: 48.7mA
• LCD backlight: 8.9mA
• LCD excluding backlight: 1.148mA
• FET driver (standby): 106.56uA
• FET driver (62.5kHz, Iout=0): 2847uA
• FET driver (62.5kHz, Iout=2.5A): 2937uA
• Current sensors (each): 48.6uA

So the arduino itself is using up the lion’s share of current. Next comes the LCD backlight. Nothing unexpected so far. The LCD without backlight still consumes a considerable 1.15mA, no matter if it’s on or off. The FET driver uses around 2.9mA when on and only about 0.1mA when off. Output current only has a minor impact. The current sensors don’t use up much – less than 0.1mA for both.

Check out my next post for a closer look at the software or here for an overview over this project.

Arduino Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 13: Arduino library finally ready

It’s been a while since the last post of this series. As so often, the task turned out to be more demanding than I first thought. And then I was also entirely new to assembly language, got distracted by my Inductance Meter Project (http://soldernerd.com/2014/12/14/arduino-based-inductance-meter/) and went on a skiing holiday. But finally, the promised library is ready.

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/. This is also where you find all the various downloads, including the new library.

Using the new library is easy:

#include <anemometer.h>
extern volatile anemometerResults_t *anemometerCalculationSet;
extern volatile uint8_t anemometerStatus;

anemometerSetup();

You can then access the results as follows (replace NORTH_TO_SOUTH with SOUTH_TO_NORTH, EAST_TO_WEST or WEST_TO_EAST as needed):

anemometerCalculationSet[NORTH_TO_SOUTH].timeOfFlight
anemometerCalculationSet[NORTH_TO_SOUTH].sine
anemometerCalculationSet[SOUTH_TO_NORTH].cosine

I’ll go through the meaning and usage of these one by one:

anemometerSetup()

This function has to be called once before the anemometer can be used:

void setup()
{
  anemometerSetup();
}

anemometerStatus

anemometerStatus notifies your when a new set of measurements has been completed and is ready to use. Every time a new set is ready, anemometerStatus will be set to 1. You have to set it back to 0 once you’re done with your calculations.

if(anemometerStatus==1)
{
   /* use the results */
   anemometerStatus = 0;
}

A new set of results is made available exactly every 250ms or 4 times a second.

anemometerCalculationSet

anemometerCalculationSet is a pointer to the ready-to-use results.

Internally, the library uses a ping-pong buffer. Every time a new set of results becomes available, anemometerCalculationSet is updated to point to the last completed set of results.

The result set pointed to by anemometerCalculationSet is a

anemometerResults_t anemometerResults[4];

where anemometerResults_t is a struct defined as

typedef struct
{
  uint32_t timeOfFlight;
  int16_t sine;
  int16_t cosine;
} anemometerResults_t;

The following #defines may be used as array subscripts:

 #define NORTH_TO_SOUTH 0
#define EAST_TO_WEST 1
#define SOUTH_TO_NORTH 2
#define WEST_TO_EAST 3

timeOfFlight

This is easy to understand. It is the time it takes for the envelope detector to trigger. It is averaged over 32 measurements. Reference point is the rising edge of the first pulse sent. The unit is nanoseconds (ns).

Time of flight explained graphically

sine, cosine

sine and cosine indicate the phase shift between the transmitted and the received signal.

This was by far the most challenging part of library. For each of the 32 measurements, 4 rising and 4 falling edged of the zero-crossing detector are evaluated. So the phase shift indicated by sine and cosine is an average over 256 measurements. But phase shifts wrap around, casually speaking.  A phase shift of 359 degrees is almost the same as phase shift of 1 degree. The average should be zero degrees, not 180. Now you could try to solve the problem by constraining your phase shift to the range of -180 to +180 degrees. But that only moves the problem to the other side of the circle: -179 and +179 degrees are almost the same and their average should be 180 degrees, not zero.

I spent quite some time thinking about this and came up with increasingly complex alogrithms that still failed when some unlucky combination of angles was encountered. Remember, we are trying to average n (currently n=256) angles, not only 2.

But of course, many people smarter than me have encountered the problem before and have come up with a perfectly elegant solution: If phi is your phase shift, then calculate sine(phi) and cosine(phi). Sum up all the sines and all the cosines. Then use the arctangent function to convert the summed sines and cosines back to an (averaged) angle. [If wordpress had something like LATEX support, one could state this as a nice-looking formula]

So there is an elegant solution. But there’s also a tight time budget: The zero-crossing detector triggeres every 12.5 microseconds (us). In order to not miss the next zero crossing, we need to calculate both sine and cosine and add them to their respective sum in less time than that. And then there is some overhead like context switching. Plus we also have to do some  housekeeping during that time.

sine and cosine are expensive functions, even more so on a 8bit microcontroller. So the only way was using a lookup table. With this approach I managed to stay within budget (around 10.8us). Besides, missing the next edge is not the end of the world – the edge after that is almost as good.

Zero-crossing interrupts are just fast enough not to miss the next edge

So we now have summed sine and cosine values – how do we use them?

atan2(cosine, .sine) gives you the phase shift in radians. Multiply this by (180/PI) if you prefer degrees. My preferred approach is:

(12500.0/PI) * atan2(cosine, sine)

This also gives you the phase shift but with nanoseconds (ns) as unit which makes it directly comparable to the timeOfFlight which is also in ns.

temperature()

There’s also another function returning the temperature. It returns a int16_t containing the temperature in 0.01 degrees centigrade. So if the temperature is 23.45 degrees, it will return 2345.

It’s currently implemented using floating-point math and does not account for the sensor’s (slightly) non-linear nature. It’s there mainly as a placeholder. I’m planning to implement it properly using a lookup-table with interpolation which will make it much faster and will allow it to include the non-linear effects.

Arduino Sketch

The .zip file with the library also includes a very basic arduino sketch using that library. I’m still evaluating what is the best way to calculate the actual wind speed and direction taking into account issues  such as calibration and the like.

But my preliminary results look quite promising and I’m confident that most if not all the heavy lifting has been done.

As always, I highly appreciate any feedback and suggestions. Click here for the next post on this project: http://soldernerd.com/2015/02/17/arduino-ultrasionic-anemometer-part-14-wind-tunnel-testing/

Arduino-based Inductance Meter

Incuctance meter in action. It displays the resonance frequency together with the inductance

I’ve just finished a little Arduino project. It’s a shield for the Arduino Uno that lets you measure inductance. This is a functionality that I found missing in just about any digital multi meter. Yes, there are specialized LCR meters that let you measure inductance but they typically won’t measure voltages or currents. So I had to build my inductance meter myself.

Close-up of the circuit with the display removed

The basic design is really simple. It a colpitts oscillator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colpitts_oscillator) with the coil missing. You use the test leads to connect it to a coil which will make it resonate. The Arduino then measures the frequency at which the oscillator is resonating and calculates the inductance. The capacitors are part of the shield so the capacity is known.

With the test leads open, the oscillator can’t resonate. The current calibration/zero-offset is displayed in stead

There is 1uH of inductance included on the schield which is placed in series with the coil to be measured. This serves two purposes: The oscillator can resonate when you short-circuit the test leads. When you then press the push button on the shield, the software will use the current measurement as new calibration. It also puts an upper limit on the resonance frequency. This ensures that the software the rest of the circuit can keep up with the oscillator.

Pressing this blue button zeroes the meter

As can be seen from the schematic, the oscillator uses two 1nF capacitors in series. Together with the 1uH inductance, this limits the frequency to about 7.1MHz. In practice, it oscillates at around 5.4MHz when the test leads are short-circuited.

The Arduino shield from below

The oscillator output is followed by a comparator turning the sine wave of the oscillator into a square wave. I’ve used an inexpensive but fast Microchip MCP6561R. It has a maximum propagation delay of 80ns which allows it to keep up at the maximum frequency.

Viewed from straight above

But of course, 5.4MHz is way too fast for the Arduino to keep up. The Arduino runs at 16MHz and will need at least a few dozend instructions to process each pulse from the shield. My solution was to add a 74HC590 8-bit binary counter dividing the frequency by 256. That gives a theoretical maximum frequency of 7.2MHz / 256 = 27.7kHz. That’s something the Arduino can deal with.

The entire shield with the display removed

For obvious reasons, there is also a display included on the shield. And then there’s that pushbutton which is debounced in hardware by running it through an RC low-pass filter and a Schmitt-triggered buffer. The button is used to zero the meter, i.e. the current measurement is used as the new zero-offset.

Even very small inductance values can be measured

All related files can be downloaded as a .zip file: LMeterShield. This includes the Arduino source code (aka sketch) as well as the Eagle files and PDFs of both the layout and the schematic.

Now there’s also a stand-alone version: http://soldernerd.com/2015/01/14/stand-alone-inductance-meter/

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 10: Arduino Shield Ready

A world’s first: Ultrasonic Anemometer Shield for Arduino Uno

I’m happy to announce that my new Arduino wind meter shield is ready. I had posted the design as well as a photo or two of the naked board in my last post but now I’ve placed and soldered all the numerous components and it’s ready to go.

Click here for an overview over this series of posts on the Arduino Ultrasonic Anemometer: http://soldernerd.com/arduino-ultrasonic-anemometer/

Looking pretty. Any good? Don’t know yet.

So now all my custom hardware boils down to this easy-to-use Arduino UNO shield. Just stack it on top of your Arduino,  attach four ultrasonic transducers and you’re ready to go.

Bottom side

I have high expectations for this shield and hope I won’t be disappointed. I’ll check on the weekend when I’ll first power it up and see if it’s any good. I’ll let you know.

Straight from above

Click here to see how the new shield perfoms: http://soldernerd.com/2014/11/30/arduino-ultrasonic-anemometer-part-11-testing-the-new-hardware/

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 8: More Software

In my last post I talked about how to get the Arduino to output bursts of 40kHz pulses. Today I’ll go through the rest of the software so by the end of this post we’ll have a very rudimentary but working sketch for our ultrasonic wind meter.

Click here for an overview over this series of posts on the Arduino Ultrasonic Anemometer: http://soldernerd.com/arduino-ultrasonic-anemometer/

Overview over one round of measurements, i.e. each direction is measured once in turn.

If you’ve read part 7 of this series you will have noticed that all the key tasks are handled not in the main code but in interrupt service routines (ISRs). That’s fairly typical for an application like this one.

In this project, there are 2 ISRs:

• TIMER1_COMPB Interrupt: It is triggered by Timer/Counter1. It sends 15 PWM pulses every 2ms and takes care of the Axis, Direction and Mute signals. Named TMR_INT on the screen shots in this post. This is what I’ve covered last time.
• TIMER1_CAPT Interrupt: This is where all the measurement takes place. It is triggered by the envelope detector and zero-crossing detectcor. It reads the current value of Timer/Counter1. Named CAPT_INT on the screen shots in this post. This is what I’ve covered last time. This is mainly what I’ll be covering today.

The basic Idea of the software is as follows:

1. Every measurement takes 2ms. It takes 375us (15 times 25us) to send the pulses plus 500us – 1500us for the pulses to arrive (assuming very extreme wind situations). So 2ms gives us plenty of time to finish our measurement.
2. Shortly after sending the pulses we start listening and wait for the envelope detector to trigger TIMER1_CAPT interrupt. We save the current value of timer1, this is our coarse measurement of time-of-flight. We then set up interrupts to capture a rising edge of our zero-crossing detector (ZCD).
3. A rising edge of our ZCD triggers TIMER_CAPT interrupt. We save the current value of timer1 and set up interrupts to capture a falling edge of the ZCD.
4. A falling edge of our ZCD triggers TIMER_CAPT interrupt. We save the current value of timer1 and set up interrupts to capture a rising edge of the ZCD.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until we’ve captured 8 rising and 8 falling edges. Averaging these will give us a very precise measurement of the phase shift.
6. After every measurement we change the direction we measure:  N->S, E->W, S->N, W->E, …
7. We measure each direction 32 times until we calculate the actual wind speed. So one full measurement will take 4 x 32 x 2ms = 256ms. So we take about 4 measurements per second.

Overview over a single measuement

The screen shot above shows how a measuement proceeds: AXIS and DIRECTION are set depending on the direction to be measured. MUTE is driven high and 15 PWM pulses are sent. TMR_INT  triggers after every pulse in order to count them. After a short break, TMR_INT triggers again and turns MUTE off again. Eventually, the envelope detector (ENV_DETCT) triggers CAPT_INT. Shortly afterwards, CAPT_INT is triggered 16 more times by the zero-crossing detector (ZCD).

Close-up of the actual measurement.

There are 2 sets of variables to save all the measurements from the envelope and zero-crossing detector: At any point in time, one is in use by the ongoing measurements, i.e. they’re being updated. The other set represents the last set of measurements and is static. This second set can be used by software in our main loop to calculate the wind speed and direction. As I’ve said, capturing one set of measurements takes 256ms. So we also have 256ms to do all the calculations, send data (via USB or whatever), write the new measurement to the display, do some data logging or whatever else we have in mind. There is likely to be some floating-point math, square roots and tigonometric functions going to be needed to arrive at the wind speed and direction but 256ms should be pretty comfortable even for that.

A long series of measuements. Look at the cursors: It takes about 25ms to do our calculations.

This is what I’ve tried to show in the screenshot above: There is a signal named CALC which is driven high when a new set of measuements becomes available and driven low when the calculations are finished. So this signal shows you how much time the Arduino’s Atmega328 spends processing the data and writing to the display. As you can see, it’s less than 25ms so there is ample of room for more complex calculations or other tasks. We’ll definitely need some of that head room since the calculations performed so far are really just the bare minimum.

There definitely is still a lot to be improved, mainly how the raw measurements are evaluated to get the actual wind speed. But what’s more important to me at this time is that the basic idea/setup works. With no wind, my measuements fluctuate somewhere between plus/minus 0.3 meters per second without having done any calibration. It also reacts nicely when I blow a bit of air towards it.

I’ve changed the pinout many times while developing this software but I’m confident that I won’t have to change the pinout any more. So my plan is to now build version 2 of the hardware first. The entire setup will be much less complex (and prone to errors) without all the lose wires going back and forth between the different boards. Then, with the updated and hopefully final (or nearly final) hardware I’ll go ahead and finish the software.

Speaking of software: You can download the Arduino sketch from the overview page where you also find the Eagle files for both boards: http://soldernerd.com/arduino-ultrasonic-anemometer/. I’ll make it a habit to post all the download material for this project on the overview page so people don’t need to go through all the posts trying to find a certain file.

That’s it for today, continue here to my next post of this series: http://soldernerd.com/2014/11/25/arduino-ultrasonic-anemometer-part-9-a-new-hardware/

Arduino Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 7: Basic software

Today I’ll tell you how I got started with my software. If you’re new to my blog you might want to click here for an overview over my arduino-based wind meter project: http://soldernerd.com/arduino-ultrasonic-anemometer/

The first thing we’ll need to archive is to send a series of pulses at 40kHz which is the frequency the ultrasonic transducers work. They must be as precise and repeatable as possible since all our measurements depend on them. Any jitter and the like will affect our measurements. And the duty cycle should be 50%. So you really want to do them in hardware. The Atmega328 comes with a single 16-bit counter/timer (Timer/Counter1) as well as two 8-bit counters (Timer/Counter 0 and 2). We’ll need the 16-bit resolution so the choice is clear: Timer1.

Sending pulses using timer/counter1

Well yes, you could easily use one of the 8-bit counters to generate your pulses but you’ll still need timer1 for measurement. I’ve decided to do everything with just one timer so it’s going to be timer1.

How many pulses we should send is not so clear. I’m working with 15 pulses which works quite well but I’m not claiming it’s an optimal choice. But it is short enough to make sure we’ve stopped transmitting before the first sound waves reach the opposite transducer, even with heavy tail wind.

Since we have such strict requirements for our pulses, we can’t rely on any of those convenient high-level functions to set up our timer but have to study the Atmega328 datasheet and do it ourselfs.

This is what I have done:

pinMode(10, OUTPUT);
TCCR1A = 0b00100011;
TCCR1B = 0b11011001;
OCR1AH = 0x01;
OCR1AL = 0x8F;
OCR1BH = 0x00;
OCR1BL = 0xC7;

This is a short explanation of what it does: Set pin 10 as an output. Arduino pin10 is pin16 of the Atmega328. And that’s the pin connected to the output B of timer1. That’s line 1.

I then set up counter1 in FastPWM mode running at the full system clock frequency of 16MHz. Output B (that’s our pin 10 on the arduino) is set high when the counter starts at zero. It will be cleared (i.e. set low) when the timer reaches the value in output compare register B (OCR1B). The counter will be reset when (i.e.it will start at zero again) when it reaches the value in couput compare register A (OCR1A). I also enable an interrupt for when the timer overflows. More on that later. That’s lines 2 and 3.

Then comes the part where I actually set duty cycle and pulse with. I do that by setting the output compare registers. OCR1AH and OCR1AB are the high and low bytes of register OCR1A. So the final value in that register is 0x018F which equals to 399. That means counter 1 will count from 0 up to 399 before it starts again. That’s 400 steps. And here’s the math: The timer runs at 16MHz, our counter will overflow every 400 cycles. 16000000 / 400 = 40000. That’s exactly the 40kHz we’re looking for. The duty cycle is set to half that time by setting OCR1B to 199 or 0x00C7.

That’s it. We have a perfect PWM signal at exactly 40kHz and 50% duty cycle. Look at the screenshot above to convince you that this is exactly what we are getting.

But so far, the pulses go on forever. What we need is a way to turn the output signal off after 15 (say) pulses. One way of doing that is to count the pulses and turn the output off once the 15 pulses have been sent. That’s what the interrupt at overflow is used for.

In that ISR (interrupt service routine) I increment the variable pulse_count. Once pulse_count reaches 15 I know that all the pulses have been sent and turn the output off: TCCR1A = 0b00000011; The timer/counter will continue to run but the PWM output has been turned off.

For debugging/monitoring purposes, I set pin A5 high at the beginning of the ISR and low at the end. So I can tell when (and how long) the ISR is running by monitoring pin A5. Here’s what I get:

Pulses sent (yellow) and time spent in timer interrupts (blue)

The yellow signal is the PWM output (pin10) as before. The blue line shows the time spent handling the interrupt. I could then continue counting without sending any pulses and turn the output back on when I reach 80 for example. And at the very beginning that’s exactly what I did. But then the microcontroller has to handle an interrupt every 25us (microseconds) even when not sending pulses. That’s quite wasteful so I set a longer time period by increasing the OCR1A and OCR1B registers seen above.

Actually, I’m using this interrupt to do some other things as well such as setting Axis and Direction as well as the Mute signal and some other housekeeping. That wide blue pulse you see at the left side of the screenshot above does most of that, that’s why it is so wide.

Time consumed handling a regular timer overflow interrupt

Speaking of time consumed handling interrupts. It’s quite significant as you can see here: About 5 microseconds for a normal (just counting) interrupt. That’s 20% of CPU time while sending pulses (5us every 25us). That’s muuuch more than I ever imagined it to be. That’s about 80 instructions. I’m writing in C so I’ll have to check the assember code produced by the compiler to see what’s going on.

Click here for the next post of this series: http://soldernerd.com/2014/11/23/arduino-ultrasonic-anemometer-part-8-more-software/

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/