So today while doing the thoroughly mentally stimulating task of watering trees at work all day I had an epiphany. I am building a Digital Storage Oscilloscope ie. I can have 2 programs that run and have them mutually exclusive. A capture program that reads the state of the ADC(s) and pushes them to a more stable memory location(seperate section of RAM, Main HDD[my be a section of flash memory on board] or Dedicated section of Flash memory). The pseudo-code for this would be along the lines of:
Reset counter
While Stop = False do

Move state_of_ADC to register0 Move register0 to Permanent_Location[counter] counter = counter +1

EndWhile

This would give a sampling rate that can be calculated fairly easily. The instructions are fairly basic so they should each only take 1 cycle to execute. Therefore 5 cycles are required to monitor the state. Therefore we just divide the clockspeed of the CPU by 5 to give us the sampling frequency(assuming CPU at 1GHz):
That's a 200MHz sampling rate. The only problem with this method is that the only real way to change the sample rate is to change the CPU's clock speed... But if I'm going to build a radio from scratch then I dare say I'll get used to adjusting frequencies with a voltage...

The other program would be a GUI that allows the "settings" to be adjusted and a graph to be displayed. The "settings" would only effect the display. Unless I decide to implement software controllable attenuation or something useful like that. The attenuation would be done before the ADC and would be instructed to attenuate through the communication bus from the ADC which is activated for reverse transmission by sending a pin to say -5V which shouldn't happen in any other situation.

Anyway is anyone finds this helpful/instructive/wrong don't hesitate to leave a comment, more comments inspires me to write more :)

p.s. If anyone sees the HTML tags wrong or wants me to go through the tags I used here let me know any I'll put something up.

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Written by Rex ORegan-2

Published: 19 December 2012

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I just wired up a test harness to see what voltage the smoke machine would cut off current to the heating coil when I stopped(pretty unusual) and thought(don't know where this came from...) I should probably test it without anything connected to the PCB just to see what happens. So I did and lo and behold, it thought it was up to temperature... Check the voltage accross the pins... 2.5-3V there... Resistance of the temperature probe? 3 ohms... Hmmm... might not be a thermocouple... time for some more tests...

Attach the probe to PCB... heater turns on... remove it heater turns off... I can hear the relay ticking so that's not what caused it to overheat... some more research needed methinks... Wikipedia here I come...

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Written by Rex ORegan-2

Published: 09 December 2012

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Written by Rex ORegan-2

Published: 09 December 2012

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Looking at the Wikipedia page on thermocouples I found this table:

Type	Temperature range °C (continuous)	Temperature range °C (short term)	Tolerance class one (°C)	Tolerance class two (°C)	IEC Color code	BS Color code	ANSI Color code
K	0 to +1100	−180 to +1300	±1.5 between −40 °C and 375 °C ±0.004×T between 375 °C and 1000 °C	±2.5 between −40 °C and 333 °C ±0.0075×T between 333 °C and 1200 °C
J	0 to +750	−180 to +800	±1.5 between −40 °C and 375 °C ±0.004×T between 375 °C and 750 °C	±2.5 between −40 °C and 333 °C ±0.0075×T between 333 °C and 750 °C
N	0 to +1100	−270 to +1300	±1.5 between −40 °C and 375 °C ±0.004×T between 375 °C and 1000 °C	±2.5 between −40 °C and 333 °C ±0.0075×T between 333 °C and 1200 °C
R	0 to +1600	−50 to +1700	±1.0 between 0 °C and 1100 °C ±[1 + 0.003×(T − 1100)] between 1100 °C and 1600 °C	±1.5 between 0 °C and 600 °C ±0.0025×T between 600 °C and 1600 °C			Not defined.
S	0 to 1600	−50 to +1750	±1.0 between 0 °C and 1100 °C ±[1 + 0.003×(T − 1100)] between 1100 °C and 1600 °C	±1.5 between 0 °C and 600 °C ±0.0025×T between 600 °C and 1600 °C			Not defined.
B	+200 to +1700	0 to +1820	Not Available	±0.0025×T between 600 °C and 1700 °C	No standard use copper wire	No standard use copper wire	Not defined.
T	−185 to +300	−250 to +400	±0.5 between −40 °C and 125 °C ±0.004×T between 125 °C and 350 °C	±1.0 between −40 °C and 133 °C ±0.0075×T between 133 °C and 350 °C
E	0 to +800	−40 to +900	±1.5 between −40 °C and 375 °C ±0.004×T between 375 °C and 800 °C	±2.5 between −40 °C and 333 °C ±0.0075×T between 333 °C and 900 °C
Chromel/AuFe	−272 to +300	n/a	Reproducibility 0.2% of the voltage; each sensor needs individual calibration.				Details Written by Rex ORegan-2 Published: 08 December 2012 Write comment (0 Comments) More progress on the fog machine FM-1500 Fog machine heat exchanger melted Page 43 of 46 Older Posts Land Rover in the snow Land Rover Electrical A New Project starting Sometimes good enough...is Land Rover Tribulations Buy vs. DIY Popular Tags LandRover rants philosophy wall of text Repair Radio AM Most Read Posts FM-1500 Fog machine heat exchanger melted A New Project starting Land Rover Electrical Land Rover in the snow Sometimes good enough...is Today1181 Yesterday1788 This week10736 This month1181 Total1199949 Visitor Info IP: 13.59.75.169 Browser: Unknown Browser Version: Operating System: Unknown Who Is Online 1 Online 2024-11-01 My Blog