Les transducteurs Piezo sont très courants, ne coutent rien, et peuvent se révéler d’excellent capteurs : son, choc, vibrations; tant que quelque chose « bouge » suffisamment ou fait du bruit, un capteur piézo peut être intéressant.

En revanche, le signal généré par ces petites bêtes n’est pas très amical pour l’amateur d’électronique digitale : en gros, c’est une sinusoïde qui s’aplatit avec le temps. Par ailleurs, le signal se promène souvent dans les quartiers mal fréquentés des tensions négatives, ce qui n’est pas très agréable pour la plupart des chips et µcontrolleurs utilisés en électronique digitale. Par exemple, la datasheet de l’ATMega 168 (et c’est pareil pour la plupart des µ 8 bits d’atmel) indique que la tension appliquée à n’importe quelle patte doit se trouver entre -0.5V et VCC+0.5V. Les transducteurs piézo peuvent allègrement dépasser ces limites.

Dans la capture ci-dessous, la tension lue aux bornes du piézo descend jusqu’à -52V et monte jusqu’à 9.2V. Ca fait plus de 60V crête à crête. Si on ne fait rien, le µ peut rapidement en faire une jaunisse… :

Signal brut du piezo

Dans la capture suivante, le signal descend d’abord à -20V, puis s’envole au dessus de 35V. Presque 60Vpp (crête à crête) ici aussi :

Signal brut du piezo (bis)

Ce ne sont que des exemples. Je n’ai pas torturé ou frappé au marteau sur le piezo. Tapotez le juste avec un ongle et vous vous retrouverez en général avec des valeurs crête à crête énormes. L’autre problème c’est que ces valeurs sont imprévisible (les piézos le sont, mais pas la manière dont on les brutalise) : ça peut commencer par monter, puis descendre, puis monter, qui sait…

Un petit coup de zoom montre l’effet « sinusoïde qui s’aplatit » que l’on observe en général après les plus gros pics de tension :

Agrandissement du signal piezo

Le conditionnement de signal est donc une étape obligatoire si l’on travaille en digital avec des piézos.

Récapitulons ce que nous devons faire au signal pour le dompter :

1. rendre le signal positif : la plupart du temps, les piezos sont lus par des CAN (convertisseurs analogiques/numériques), on veut donc des tensions positives
2. restreindre son amplitude entre 0 et VCC, pour éviter que la tension n’affiche des valeurs effrayantes pour des µcontrolleurs et des CAN.
3. modifier la forme du signal pour éviter les bosses, et le rendre plus propre et prévisible

Tout cela n’est pas très compliqué à obtenir en fait. On va y aller en trois étapes, traitant respectivement les trois points ci-dessus :

1. ajouter un redresseur simple alternance, pour garder la partie positive du signal
2. ajout d’une diode zener pour éviter que les valeurs de signal soient supérieure à la tension d’avalanche de la zener
3. ajouter un couple RC afin de filtrer les vaguelettes du signal

Redresseur simple alternance

En premier lieu, nous voulons rectifier le signal piezo, c’est à dire le rendre toujours positif. Pour cela, nous allons utiliser des diodes Schottky. Les diodes Schottky sont plus intéressantes car elles ont un seuil de tension directe (Vf) très bas (par comparaison avec des diodes standard), aux alentours de 0.3V.

Signal du piezo vu derrière un pont redresseur complet

On peut se demander : pourquoi ne pas utiliser un pont redresseur complet à base de Schottky et rendre le signal tout entier positif (comme si l’on prenait la valeur absolue du signal) au lieu d’ignorer les tensions négatives ?

Regardons les premières captures de signal brut à l’oscillo. Lorsque le signal change de signe, il le fait plutôt violemment, et son amplitude peut même être plus importante après le croisement du zéro qu’avant. Maintenant essayons d’appliquer la fonction mathématique ‘abs’ sur la courbe. On va se retrouver avec une courbe erratique : faible amplitude, plus haute, puis faible, etc… Même avec un filtrage poussé, ça sera difficile d’arriver à quelque chose de propre, et on aura toujours une coube sautillante, moins sauve que l’originale et complètement positive certes, ais difficilement exploitable.

L’idée consiste donc à sacrifier la partie négative de la courbe pour obtenir un résultat plus lisse (le bug Agilent est offert gracieusement).

Signal du piezo signal rectifié seulement par une diode Schottky

En fait, on va faire un peu plus qu’un redresseur simple alternance. Si on ne met qu’une diode Schottky en série on se retrouvera avec une courbe ressemblant à elle de gauche. Nous pouvons voir qu’il reste une partie non négligeable du signal sous 0V, et dans notre circuit, ce n’est pas censé se produire.
Même dans l’éventualité ou l’ADC s’en accommoderait, il ne ferait pas vraiment d’étincelles en mesurant une tension négative.

Il y a surement une bonne raison pour que le signal se comporte de la sorte, mais je ne la connais pas. N’hésitez pas à commenter si vous avez la réponse.

On doit donc se débarrasser de ce reliquat négatif et pour cela, nous allons utiliser une deuxième Schottky entre la masse et le signal. On ne garde que le signal positif, ca sera nettement plus simple comme ça.

Signal piezo rectifié par deux diodes Schottky

Notre signal rectifié par les deux Schottky ressemble à la courbe de gauche (la courbe à éét décalée vers le bas pour des raisons esthétiques). On a encore quelques tensions négatives qui apparaissent, mais c’est presque négligeable maintenant. On peut se demander si ces -400mV ont un rapport avec le Vf de la diode.

Même si l’échelle est différente, les vaguelettes semblent avoir disparues. C’est peut être du à la capacitance de la Schottky (14pF), qui, même si elle est faible, peut impacter les vaguelettes haute fréquence. Je n’ai pas eu le temps de vérifier.

Maintenant nous devons limiter la tension maximale dans notre circuit, histoire de ne pas martyriser notre CAN.
Diode Zener

Comme vu plus haut, l’amplitude en tension est importante et on peut rapidement atteindre des valeurs inadaptées pour de l’électronique digitale. On doit donc dompter cette tension générée par le piézo. Les diodes Zener peuvent le faire : elles peuvent limiter la tension dans un circuit à une valeur fixe : quand la tension dans le circuit est supérieure à la tension d’avalanche de la Zener, elle devient passante, aidant ainsi à maintenant la tension sous ce seuil.

Signal du piezo signal, après les redresseurs Schottky et la Zener

En général, on doit ajouter une résistance en série avec la Zener afin de limiter le courant traversant la diode. Mais avec un piezo, ce n’est pas nécessaire, dans la mesure ou les courants en jeu sont très faibles.

Après avoir ajouté notre Zener de 5.1v dans le circuit, la tension le sur le piézo ressemble à la capture de gauche.

Vous pouvez torturer le piezo autant que vous voulez, vous ne pourrez pas dépasser le tension d’avalanche de la Zener.

Si l’on en reste là, on aura pas mal de difficulté à savoir si le pizeo a été actionné une ou plusieurs fois. Nous allons devoir filtrer les pics afin d’obtenir une courbe plus docile.

Filtrage du signal

Ce signal peut être filtré par une cellule RC. Nous avons juste besoin de savoir combien de temps nous voulons voir la courbe durer afin d’ajuster les valeurs de R et de C. Pour mon application (batterie électronique), je voulais que le signal s’estompe en 10ms maximum. Comme l’on sait que le voltage descend à 10% de sa valeur initiale après Error: http://leucos.lstilde.org/wp/wp-content/plugins/wpmathpub/phpmathpublisher/img/ must have write access Read the official wpmathpub plugin FAQ for more details, on peut trouver le bon condensateur en fonction de la résistance ou vice-vesa.

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Au final, on se retrouve avec ce circuit plutôt simple :

Et avec cette ravissante courbe :

Enfin, un signal propre, agréable en bouche pour le convertisseur analogique/digital

J’espère que ce petit article vous aura aidé à dompter ces petite bêtes sauvages que sont les piézos. Attention toutefois, les piézos sont tous différents, et la taille compte. Alors expérimentez sur ces bases avant de graver en me croyant sur parole.

However, the signal from those things is very unpleasant for the digital hacker : it’s roughly a sinewave that dampens over time. Also, the signal often goes negative which is pretty bad for mots digital chips out there. The ATmega168 (and most of the atmel 8 bit microcontrollers), for instance, indicates that voltage on any pin must be between -0.5V to VCC+0.5V. Piezo transducer easily go far beyond those bounds.

In the capture below, voltage from the piezo goes a down as -52V and goes up to 9.2V. This is more than 60V peak to peak. If you don’t do anything, your poor microcontroller might get sick rather quicly :

Raw signal from piezo

In this capture, the signal first drops to -20V, and then flies up to over 35V. Almost 60Vpp here too.

Raw signal from piezo (bis)

These are just examples, I didn’t tweak the piezo or smashed it with a hammer : just a hit with a fingernail, and you almost always end up having huge Vpp values. Also, the behaviour is not predictable (well piezos are, but the way we smack it isn’t), so it might go up first, then down, then up, who knows…

A close up shows the « dampening sine-like signal » that occurs after the first big spikes :

Piezo signal close up

So signal conditioning is a must with those pesky animals if you’re doing digital.

Let’s recap what has to be done :

1. make that signal all positive :  most of the time, piezos signals are read by ADC, so we want positive voltages
2. restrict signal bounds to 0 – VCC so voltage doesn’t climb to scary values (scary at least for microcontrollers and ADCs),
3. shape the signal so it doesn’t make bumps and stays clean and predictable

All these requirements are surprisingly easy to achieve. We will get to this goal in three steps, each spect taking care of one item above. Respectively :

1. add a half-wave rectifier, in order to keep positive part of the waves
2. add a zener diode, so signal doesn’t climb over zener’s breakdown voltage
3. add a RC pair so ripples get filtered

Half bridge rectifier

First, we want to rectify the piezo signal, i.e. make it all positive. We’ll use Schottky diodes for that. Schottky are more interesting since they have a pretty low (compared to standard rectifier diodes) forward voltage drop (Vf), around 0.3V.

Piezo signal as seen after a full-wave rectifier

You might ask : why not use a complete Schottky-based bridge rectifier, and make the whole signal positive, instead of filtering negative voltages ?

Well, look back at the first scope shots of raw piezo signals. When signal changes sign, it makes it rather violently, and can even be higher on the new side than it was on the previous side. Now try to make the math abs() operation on the shape, mirroring the negative part of the shape on the other side of the time axis. You’ll end-up with an erratic plot : low, then high, then low. This means that, even with some filtering, you wont end-up with clean shape, but with a jittering thing that will look like the first signal, but all positive and less wild. This is not what we want, so we are sacrificing the negative part of the signal to get something nicer (the fine Agilent firmware bug is provided free of charge .

Piezo signal rectified by only one Schottky diode

In fact, well do a bit more than a half wave rectifier. If we just put a Schottky diode in series with the positive we’ll end up with the kind of signal shape shown on the left. We can see there is a fair amount of signal that is still below 0v, and in our circuit, we’re not supposed to have negative voltages. Even if the ADC can stand it, it probably won’t do any interesting measures with a negative signal.

There is probably a good reason for this to happen, but I don’t have a clue right now. If you do, please leave a comment.

So we have to get rid of this negative leftover, by adding a second Schottky diode, between ground and signal lines. We’ll just keep the positive signal, but it will be much easier to filter this way.

Piezo signal rectified by two Schottky

Our piezo signal rectified by two Schottky looks like this (the wavefom has been moved to the bottom of the screen for cosmetic reasons). We still have negative voltable building up, but it’s pretty negligible now. I wonder if that -400mV is linked to the diode’s forward voltage.

Althought the scale isn’t the same, the small ripples seem to have disappeared. This might be due to the Schottky diode capacitance (14pF), which, while low, could impact the small ripples with higher frequency. I didn’t have time to check that though.

Now, we need to cap the maximum voltage in circuit, so we don’t fry our ADC.
Zener diode

As seen above, voltage range is pretty high and can climb quickly to unappropriate values for digital purposes. So wee need to tame the voltage created by the piezo. Zeners have this ability, and can limit voltage to a fixed value. Whenever voltage is higher than the Zener’s rating, the Zeners lets current flow thru and as a side effect, help maintain voltage to a fixed value.

Piezo signal, after Schottky rectifiers and Zener

We usually have to add a resistor between the Zener and ground, so voltage builds up around it and current is limited thru the Zener. But this is not necessary with piezo, since involved currents are very very low.

After we add a 5.1v Zener in the circuit, the voltage read from a piezo looks like this.

You can smash the piezo as hard as you want, you’ll never exceed the Zener’s rated voltage.

If we just use this shape as is, we’ll have a hard time trying to guess if the piezo has been smashed or not. We have to filter those spikes to get a smoother shape.

Filtering the signal

This signal can be filtered by using a RC cell. Whe just need to know how long we want the shape to last. For my application (drum trigger), I want the signal to fade out in 10ms maximum. Since we know that the voltage drops to 10% of the initial voltage after Error: http://leucos.lstilde.org/wp/wp-content/plugins/wpmathpub/phpmathpublisher/img/ must have write access Read the official wpmathpub plugin FAQ for more details, we can find the right resistor knowing the capacitor value, and vice-versa.

Let’s say we use a 1MΩ resistor, we’ll have to use aError: http://leucos.lstilde.org/wp/wp-content/plugins/wpmathpub/phpmathpublisher/img/ must have write access Read the official wpmathpub plugin FAQ for more details capacitor.

So we end up with this simple little circuit :

And get this nice little shape :

Finaly, a clean, ADC friendly signal

Hope this can help you using those pesky beasts. Be warned that piezo are all differents, and that size matters… So experiment with that before engraving the above stuff in copper.

Voltage reference

In some project, I wanted to use my µcontroller ADC to get battery voltage. The first problem you encounter is : how can I measure on my ADC the circuit voltage since the top value of the ADC is the circuit voltage itself ? Yes, indeed, using the ADC this way you’ll always end up reading the maximum value (256 for 8 bits ones, 1024 for 10 bits ones, …), since the circuit voltage is the reference voltage.

This can be solved most of the time. For instance, in atmel microcontrollers, you just have to use the internal reference (most of the time 1.1v or 2.56v) by changing the ADMUX register bits. Atmel AVRs also let you provide your own reference at the AREF pin. The datasheet gives plenty of details about this.

When using Arduino, you can achieve the same ADMUX control by using the analogReference(ref) command where ref can be one of :

• DEFAULT: use the circuit’s supply as reference (5 or 3.3 volts depending on the supply)
• INTERNAL: use the built-in reference 1.1 volts on the ATmega168 and 2.56 volts on the ATmega8.
• EXTERNAL: the voltage applied to the AREF pin is used as the reference.

This being said, we can start working, but the real challenges lies ahead.

Gain

Simple voltage divider

Now that we have our reference, how can we measure that battery (let’s say LiPo) voltage ? Let’s suppose the chosen reference is 1.1v. We can not compare the battery voltage directly. LiPo can go as high as 4.25v, much higher than our reference. So we have to scale it down. We can use a voltage divider (a pair of resistors) to make this easily. By doing so, we are applying a gain < 1, to make the battery voltage range seen by the ADC fit below our voltage reference.

Now, what resistors values should we choose ?

We know that :

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Since we want V to be 1.1v (same as our voltage reference) when battery is full (thus 4.25v), the equation can be written as :

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Ok, we have our R1/R2 ratio. Since we don’t want this circuit to waste energy (after all, we’re measuring our own battery), we want R1 and R2 to be as high as reasonably possible so current flowing will be negligeable.

Let’s say we take 3MΩ for R2, we can use a 1MΩ resistor for R1.

Great, we now lowered the voltage in our circuit, so when the battery is full (4.25v), we read almost exactly the value given by our voltage reference (1.1 in this case), which is the max value that our ADC can report.

But wait, what happens when the battery is depleted ? Depleted batteries never show 0v. LiPos for instance, are depleted at 2.7v. What will 2.7v show in the ADC in our situation ? Remember :

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Thus, when our LiPo is empty, we’ll read 0.675v, and since :

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So our 10bits ADC will tell us some number around 628. So, unfortunately, in this configuration, the only range used by our 10bits ADC is [628-1024], approximately 60% of it’s range. This is pretty bad. Now that we know how to make the voltage range fit below our voltage reference, it could be cool to extend this to the full range of our ADC. We now want our ADC to say 0 when battery is depleted, and not 628.

Offsetting

As you may have guessed, we can achieve that by offsetting. Offsetting means adjusting the range by using an offset value. And in our case, we just want to lower measured signal by the minimum value the battery can have : 2.7v.

Ok, but how can we do that ?

Offsetting the signal with a simple diode

Well, everybody out there probaby know this way to go already. But being self taught in electronics, I just didn’t had the iden in the first place. I probably not very good at Googling too, so, I just searched for a way.

My initial idea was to use a rectifier diode. Let’s say we arrange the circuit on the left, with a diode between Vbat and R2. Voltage between the diode will be Error: http://leucos.lstilde.org/wp/wp-content/plugins/wpmathpub/phpmathpublisher/img/ must have write access Read the official wpmathpub plugin FAQ for more details. This is fine, things are starting to take place. Yes we want to drop some voltage thru rectifiers until Vf is 2.7v (the minimum value we are interested in).

Unfortunately, this is not practical. First, Vf varies greatly according to the current in he circuit. Take a diode datasheet, find the Vf vs. I graph, you’ll get the idea. The other problem is to get the Vf we want. It varies, but it is usualy pretty low. This means that we would have to chain several diodes to get the desired effect, but might get surprised in the real achieved Vf, since it depends on diode bin, current, the way we read the graphs, etc…

Not very practical. After spending an hour browsing datasheets to find the holy grail having the good Vf, I slammed my head on thedesk : « Just use a Zener stupid n00b!« . Yes, Zener, that was the solution.

Instead of chaining diodes, I just had to put a Zener at the same place, reverse biased, with Vr being the lowest value I needed to measure in my circuit !

But there is still a problem : we are interested in the Zener’s have a reverse breakdown volatge value. But this voltage (usually noted Vr in their datasheets) is given for a certain current. If we use MegaOhm-style resistors, it simply won’t work : you’ll end up with a Vr completely different (around 0.7v, the classic N-P junction Vf with the Zener I tried). Again, we have to open the Zener’s datasheet, and look for the test current.

For instance BZX79 series have an Iztest current of 5mA. This means that we will have to make 5mA flow thru this branch to have the reverse breakdown voltage we are looking for.On the capture below, we can see the ideal situation. Yellow is Vbat, green is Vbat-Vz and purple is Vz (Vz is calculated by the scope, note the different scale).

Voltages in seen in circuit (yellow is Vbat, green is Vbat-Vz, purple is Vz)

But the needed current for the Zener to work is pretty high, given we are running on batteries, and we want to be energy conservative. So, how can we do ?

After some more thoughts, the solution came : instead of plugging this circuitry to ground, we’ll plug it to a microcontroller pin. When we want to measure the battery voltage (which is something we son’t have to do very often), we just put the pin in OUTPUT mode, and set it to 0v (low). Despite the name, when a pin is in OUTPUT mode, it will sink current if it’s low. The rest of the time, the pin will be set to INPUT mode (Hi-z). It’s as easy as this.

Final circuit for battery monitoring

The circuit now looks like this. With our ADC, we are measuring voltage V, between the « first » resistor and the reverse biased Zener.

How can we choose the component values to maximize ADC range now ? We’ll try to find this out with generic terms, so it can be applied to other power sources.

First, some facts. The maximum value that will be read by the ADC will be Vref when supply voltage is VbatMax – Vz.
The minimum value read will be VbatMin-Vz, and should be equal to 0.

We already can deduce how we have to choose Vz (and thus, the Zener) :

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Ok, the right Zener Vz should be equal to the minimum reading we’re interested in, just what we guessed above.

Now, let’s try to find the usual relationship between R1 and R2 in our voltage divider. As stated in the above facts, the maximum value that will be read by the ADC is VbatMax – Vz. Ideally, in the middle of our voltage divider, this value should be exactly equal (scaled) to Vref (let’s call it Vmax).

Thus, we can lay down the usual voltage divider equation stuff :

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Since all the « Vsomething » are known values, we do have a relashionship between R1 and R2 to create our divider. The values used do not matter, only the ratio… err wait. Let’s not forgot about the Zener’s Iztest ! Remember that to get the reverse beakdown voltage we need, we have a constraint : we have to make the Iztest  current flow thru the circuit. So we need to scale R1 and R2 appropriately. Of course, since the battery voltage varies (why would we need to measure it if it wouldn’t ?), establishing a current based on the resistors values is an approximation. When the battery voltage will be low, the current will low too, and our measurement won’t be as accurate as with a full battery.

We have several ways to handle this : we can just ignore this, and assume some average voltage. This would be probably fine for LiPos, since most of the time, they hang around 3.7v. We could get the lowest voltage we want to measure, and take it as a base to calculate resistor values to achieve Iztest. But since this voltage is zero, we won’t go far. The best option is probably to take the microcontroller datasheet, and use the maximum sink current (let’s call it Isink, watch for typos ) when Vbat is at maximum. This will suck the battery a bit during the ADC sampling, but again, we don’t need to check battery voltage every millisecond. Of course, we need Isink to be higher than Iztest. If Isink > Iztest, no problem as long as we don’t go over the Zener’s power rating. If Isink < Iztest, dump that crappy microcontroller, turn computer off, and have a walk.

Ok, let’s use this and calculate resistor values to get a correct current, and a good resistor ratio.

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Since VbatMax, Vz and Isink are known values, we know what R1+R2 is. And since we have a relashionship between R1 and R2, we have all we need to get R1 and R2 values. Let’s try it out.

Pencil and paper test

Let’s try a real life example. We want to measure our LiPo voltage. So we’ll use these values :

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We already know that : Error: http://leucos.lstilde.org/wp/wp-content/plugins/wpmathpub/phpmathpublisher/img/ must have write access Read the official wpmathpub plugin FAQ for more details

Let’s find the R1+R2 sum first : Error: http://leucos.lstilde.org/wp/wp-content/plugins/wpmathpub/phpmathpublisher/img/ must have write access Read the official wpmathpub plugin FAQ for more details

Ok, now, we can use the R1-R2 relashionship : Error: http://leucos.lstilde.org/wp/wp-content/plugins/wpmathpub/phpmathpublisher/img/ must have write access Read the official wpmathpub plugin FAQ for more details

So, reusing the R1+R2 equation above, Error: http://leucos.lstilde.org/wp/wp-content/plugins/wpmathpub/phpmathpublisher/img/ must have write access Read the official wpmathpub plugin FAQ for more details (we’ll use the closest standard value 56Ω).

Finally, Error: http://leucos.lstilde.org/wp/wp-content/plugins/wpmathpub/phpmathpublisher/img/ must have write access Read the official wpmathpub plugin FAQ for more details (we’ll use the closest standard value 22Ω).

Converting ADC reading to real voltage

Now that we’ve been this far, let’s not forget what we came here for : get the battery voltage. we have to convert the ADC value back to some human reading.

A n bits ADC reads the voltage at V, and converts it linearly (supposedly) into a value between 0 (meaning 0v in our case) and Error: http://leucos.lstilde.org/wp/wp-content/plugins/wpmathpub/phpmathpublisher/img/ must have write access Read the official wpmathpub plugin FAQ for more details (meaning Vref in our case).

So to convert for an ADC value to battery voltage, we can use :

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Cheat sheet (a.k.a. fast forward mode)

Known stuff :

• Maximum voltage to be measured : Error: http://leucos.lstilde.org/wp/wp-content/plugins/wpmathpub/phpmathpublisher/img/ must have write access Read the official wpmathpub plugin FAQ for more details
• Minimum voltage to be measured : Error: http://leucos.lstilde.org/wp/wp-content/plugins/wpmathpub/phpmathpublisher/img/ must have write access Read the official wpmathpub plugin FAQ for more details
• Voltage reference : Error: http://leucos.lstilde.org/wp/wp-content/plugins/wpmathpub/phpmathpublisher/img/ must have write access Read the official wpmathpub plugin FAQ for more details
• Maximum sink current for µcontroller : Error: http://leucos.lstilde.org/wp/wp-content/plugins/wpmathpub/phpmathpublisher/img/ must have write access Read the official wpmathpub plugin FAQ for more details

Stuff to calculate :

• Zener’s required reverse breakdown voltage :

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• Resistor value R1 (low resistor) :

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• Resistor value R2 (high resistor) :

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• n bits ADC to battery voltage conversion :

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Now, I need to test this on the breadboard. Share your experiments if you use the above stuff. And doublecheck the math

PDF version

Bat Detector

While I stumbled upon Tony Messina’s Simple Bat Detector pages long time ago,I really decided to build one only when I saw that Bre Pettis could .

So I barely used Tony’s schematics and instructions, but spiced the circuit a bit by adding a gain adjustement potentionmeter, a on/off switch driven by the volume potentiometer, and a LED witness light.

It’s pretty easy to build : thru-hole components, some wires, …. You can use the eagle schematics included below to build yours. The latest version is single sided, and doesn’t need the flying wire on the top side like mine.

The most difficult part is to find the right compononents for the switch capable potentiometer (I choosed a push/push type : push to turn on, push again to turn off) and the box.

The push/push 10kΩ potentiometer used is a tyco Electronics 17PCSA103MC19P. You can grab it at Farnell.
The other potentionmeter is just a standard 10kΩ one, like the Tyco Electronics 23ESA103MMF50NF
The enclosure is a Boss Enclosure, model BIM RETEX 551 (Betabox Series), also available at Farnell.

What I didn’t find at Farnell is the piezo-ceramic earplug. Unfortunately, I don’t remember if I got the high (E10P) or low (S83) impedance earplug.

Grab the schematic and board here :

BatDetector Schematic

BatDetector Board

On the board, there is no connector to plug the potentiometer push/push switch. So you’ll have to wire one pin of the switch to the battery clip, and the other pin to the ‘+’ connector on the board. For ground, just wire directly.

To test your detector, if you don’t have a bat under your hand, just open a water tap and aim the detector at it : it should make lots of noise. If not, try to adjust the gain settings. If nothing works, well… something is wrong

Now, just make it and go out listen for the bats. They’re pretty easy to find in semi-urban area : bats love city lights (well, they love the insects that love the city lights), especially  mercury vapor bulbs (white lights), which attract more insects. Unfortunately, most towns are now installing high pressure sodium lamps (orange), which insects doesn’t like as much. The most common bats, Pipistrelle, emit two kind of calls :

• echolocation for hunt, around 48KHz, you’ll hear those with the detector
• social calls, around 20KHz; you can hear them without any device if you’re lucky enough (or young enough)

Finally, but you probably already know that : do not wake up hinernating bats. If you do so, they have to fly, waste energy and even if they come back to sleep again, they will get hungry too early in the season. They will have to wake up to hunt, but too early means no insects, and the bat will probably die by waking too early.

Have fun !

TVBGone with it

The design is pretty simple : an AtTiny85, 6 TSAL 6100 IR diodes from Vishay (rated 1A for short pulses), 6+1 NPN transistors. Unlike what is show in the picture below, there is no more jumper (it was used to switch between programming mode and run mode). The tantalum capacitor has been scrounged, and not bought. If you know what coltan is, you know that buying tantalum stuff is rather bad.

TBGone bottom viewTVBGone with it

The thing is powered by 3xAA batteries. There is no current limiter, the only limit is provided by the batteries internal resistance so take care if you want to change supply for a LiPo or whatever, you’ll blow the LEDs for sure. In this case, add a resistor along each LED, or better, use some current regulator.

For now, the 6 TSAL LEDs are sucking 2.5 Amps without a current limiter.

TVBGone top view

The AVR code has been found on the net, and is provided here almost unmodified. The original authors are in the main.c header file, among which, of course, Limor (aka Ladyada).

I’ve changed the IR codes a bit, removing some duplicates, reordered them too so the most used codes comes first (file with modified codes is PERSOcodes.c).

One of the problems is that LG TV can not yet be turned off. This is a pain since LGs are everywhere. I don’t have time to reverse engineer timings for LG or use convert Lirc codes for now. But for sure, this would be valuable work. If you do it, please drop me a note.

EDIT : CaitSith2 dropped a note saying he has more up to date code for TVBG which turns off LGs too (see comments). So you’d better use his code than mine. Thanks CaitSith2 !

EDIT2 : It seems that CaitSith2 is more high power : 8 TSAL6100, 4xAA… nice !

In the schematics (tvbgone2_cms), all the little pads near JP1 are for a very weird slide button (I was too leazy to draw an eagle lib part). So don’t panic and adjust for your switch.

There is another schematic included : tvbgone_mini.sch, which is a variant intended to be build as jewelry. I plan to use CR2477 batteries but I never built it. If you make it, please tell me how things turned.

The P & R pins are « Program » and « Run » respectively. When done programming, just cut the wire going from the central pad to P, and make a solder bridge between the central pad and the R pad. If you need to reprogram again, remove bridge, and bridge between the central pad and P, etc…

Get the eagle schematics, grab the code, turn off those TVs and have fun.

This could be especially useful if the modem+router are deployed as an access point somewhere in the wild.

This usage is not limitating : we’re gonna build a WRT managed relay. What you switch on/off with this relay is your problem. A modem seems a reasonable idea, but you could switch a coffee pot (in this case, you should go with HTCPCP [http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2324.txt]), lights, etc…

All this is possible with little modification. The behaviour of the system here is to switch the relay for approx. 14 seconds, but this time is also easy to change. You can even use a trim pot instead to make it fully tunable.

Schematics

Relay board schematic

The schematic is rather simple. The board is connected to the internal WRT54G serial port (TX pin). This pin uses LV-TLL signals (0, +3.3V), and logic high is 0V. In other words, when nothing is send out to the serial port by the WRT, the level is low and the TX pin show 3.3V. What we want is to activate the relay when voltage on this pins drop. The trick is to feed the TX pin to the Threshold pin of a 555 timer (see those excellent 555 links in Electronics Club and Mecanno Electronique in french). And this is what happens when we the WRT sends data to the serial port : square wave comes out of second serial port TX pin and triggers the 555. For this to work, the 555 is powered at 6V, and thus triggered when TX voltage drops below 2V (approx 1/3 of VCC). The 6V feed is very primitive and comes from WRT power (12V) sliced in half by a voltage divider. It would be wiser to use a voltage regulator (7805 or al.), but we’re going the easy way here.

The trigger from the 555 is fed at the base of the 2N2222 transistor which in turns feed the coil enough current to switch.

Primitive, as I said.

Assembling it

First, be aware that doing the bad things below will void your WRT warranty, your modem warranty. You also can burn things or yourself in the process, etc… So do at your own risk. This being said, that stuff has been my first electronics project so it is really easy. « my first electronics project » should also be taken as a warning.

• Open your WRT54G (or GS, or GL) by pulling the blue cover out

• Take the WRT PCB out.

• Solder a wire in the TX pin (pin 3) of the serial port

Soldering this port is really easy, even I did it without breaking anything or melting the router to a shapeless plastic blob. You’ll find more info and pictures on the LinkSys WRT5G/GS Dual Port Mod Page. You don’t need IDC headers or high end stuff like this. Just solder in the hole. It will be ok as long as you don’t pull too much on the wire.

The blue front cover has holes inside. These holes can’t be seen from the outside because of the stickers. This is a good place to make a complete hole with a hot wire if you plan to put your PCB relay outside the WRT. For recent models, like the GL, the PCB can probably fit inside.

• Pull the TX cable through the blue cover and assemble the WRT back

• Solder the wires with the DC power jacks on the board

• Cut power cables from modem and WRT. Be sure to cut it at the right place ! You need enough cable to plug the wall wart and enough cable to plug the modem and WRT.

• Remove some insulating material from the power wires and insert them in the screw clamps. Don’t mess with polarity or which wire go where. You would burn something for sure.

• Now we need software to get this going. The basic idea is to ping some IP address, and when consecutive failures are detected, the relay is activated and the stuff behind it reboots. You can push the shell script to the WRT running Sveasoft firmware under Administration/Diagnostocs/Run, then paster script and click « Save Startup ». You can do the same with OpenWRT and probably with other firmwares.

Tune variables at your liking. You can see how the relay is software activated : it just writes ‘ACTIVATE’ to the device driving the second serial port. What you write is not important. ’saddam’ and ‘george’ work equally well for instance. You should also restrain yourself from logging too much. The idel situation for deployment is to disable debug and logging. Space is scarce on the WRT.

Here is the final thing assembler, with the driver modem (a Terayon TJ720). The system works fine but is quite static sensitive. So discharge yourself somewhere before touching the running circuit, or the relay might activate. Also, proper casing should be done. Putting the circuit inside the WRT is possible with latter models (WRT54GS and WRT54GL). This hasn’t been tester though, and might put some noise inside.

Bill of materials

Building this stuff shouldn’t take more than 2 hours and if you wish to buy parts, it will cost less than 4€ (3.0€ each by 20 at GoTronic in France).

Here is the list of components required :

Besides the board and may be the 555, the rest is easily scavengeable.

Note that DCD(1) and RI(9) are not wired.

This cable is quite handy when doing µcontroller stuff. Just put a RJ45 socket on your PCB our get a breakout board from Sparkfun and you can plug and unplug at will and securely.

After chasing the idea of building a remote for my D50, I found this really interesting page with all you need (especially the IR timing) to get your remote up and running.

But using a AtTiny2313 for this leaves a lot of room to play with. So I made an enhanced version with a 7-segments display and a menu system. The new firmware let’s you choose among several shooting modes.

The remote is almost identical to the BigMike’s one except :

• the firmware is, of course, modified
• there is no On/Off button
• there are two buttons for the menu (change/select)
• there is a 7-segments display for the menu

Remote control

The firmware sets the Tiny2313 in sleep mode after 5 seconds of inactivity.
In tis mode, the datasheet gives at most 2µA current usage. So, since a CR2032 yields 220 mAh, and if I didn’t mess up somehere, you should be up and running for 10 years.

Modes description

The remote offers 9 shot modes, which of course can be changed in the firmware.

Whatever the mode, the dp dot blinks everytime a « take shot » IR frame is sent.

• Single shot mode (symbol : reversed lower ‘c’) : one button press makes a single shot

• Double shot mode (symbol : two horizontal dashes ) : one button press makes two shots in a row

• Triple shot mode (symbol : three horizontal dashes ) : one button press makes three shots in a row

• Continuous shot (symbol : lower ‘c’) : one button press starts continuous shooting as fast as possible until the ‘menu’ button is pressed again or the battery is dead

• Continuous shot every second (symbol : number 1) : one button press starts shooting 1 picture per second until the ‘menu’ button is pressed again or the battery is dead

Numbers 2, 5, 0 and 6 are also continuous shoot mode with 1 picture every 2, 5 10 and 60 seconds respectively.

Modes selection

Files

Wanna build yours ? You’ll need :

Circuit schematic

Circuit board layout

The core of the code (IR timing loop) is taken straight from BigMike’s ASM source.

Issues

There are some issues in my version. I am not sure if they are firmware/hardware/ir issues. The problem is the reliability of triggering : sometimes it just doesn’t work. This does make the remote of reduced usability for continuous shooting modes where timing is critical.

I wonder where this problem comes from : IR receptor low sensitivity ? inaccurate frequency generation ? AF mode induced triggering problems in some situations ?
Since I have relatively few hardware here (no friend with another D50, no oscilloscope, …) I didn’t dig it up for now.

And oh, BTW, the usual warnings apply : this remote can brick your MCU, destroy your Nikon, set your house on fire, etc… You’ve been warned !

Thanks

Big thanks to Bighignoli Michele, Jonas Diemer and Nate who pioneered the area.

EDIT : I finally managed to put my hands back on the firmware ! You can grab the ASM source or the hex file. Have fun !

http://www.nearfuturelaboratory.com/2008/07/07/ds1803-digital-potentiometer/

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