Project: Microcontroller Based Ferromagnetic Material Detector This design has been divided in to 7 hierarchical blocks, to make it easier

to understand. The heart of the design is a DS80C310, a high-speed pin-to-pin compatible replacement for industry standard 8031 microcontroller. This device has enough computation power and address space to satisfy all of the requirements for the project. This example demonstrates how large designs are broken into manageable pieces, some of which can be simulated, while the entire design can be sent to Ultiboard for PCB layout. The idea behind this project is to use 6kHz resonant tank as a transmitting antenna. Inductor coil L1 (several turns of wire) in parallel to C1 creates a 6kHz resonant tank.

The pump circuit drives the IGB transistor with train of 6 kHz pulses of 25% Duty Cycle. Current inside the tank changes its direction every half period generating an alternate magnetic field around the antenna. Ferromagnetic materials being exposed to this field exhibit a unique behaviour. Socalled magnetic domains inside the ferromagnetic materials are forced to line-up with each other and the material magnetizes. By applying a magnetic field of an opposite direction causes the ferromagnetic material to demagnetize and then magnetize with different polarity. In the process of demagnetization, domains release small amount of energy and create odd harmonics disturbances of electromagnetic field around the antenna. These disturbances are picked up by the receiving antenna and fed into an analog circuitry. Band amplifier circuitry attenuates all unwanted frequencies including 6kHz and amplifies frequencies between 100kHz and 300kHz. Gain is set to about 60dB. The resulted signal can vary, widely due to the distance between ferromagnetic material and the transmitting/receiving antenna, which requires additional signal conditioning circuitry. The additional circuitry consists of an AGC amplifier, its supporting circuitry and an output

amplifier with level and gain adjustment. The output signal is being fine-tuned to match ADC's input span of 0 - 2.5V. HI-1775 is an 8-bit 20MSPS sampling A/D converter. Sampling frequency for present application is set to 6MHz. Speed is high enough to digitize the resulting signal, but too high for microcontroller to work directly with A/D converter. As a result samples of a signal image first need to be stored consecutively in Dual port memory. Where the address counter is responsible for generating the right address. When the image of a signal is fully digitized, the microcontroller downloads the image from Dual-Port memory into SRAM and compares it with images stored in EEPROM. If results of the comparison are satisfactory, the microcontroller notifies the operator using speech processor with audio amplifier. In order to chain several devices, an RS-485 transceiver is used allowing high-speed multipoint data transmission. To upload/download images and/or change configuration settings through communication with PC, a high speed RS-232 transceiver is used. Sub-circuits description: FWR 6kHZNOTCH AMPBLOCK COMM Precision Full Wave Rectifier. Ideal for low input signals rectification. The twin T notch filter is used to block an unwanted 6kHz frequency. Buffered amplifier building block with gain pin. Buffer is used to minimize insertion loss of a Twin T. Communication block. DS3695 RS485 transceiver for board-to-board communication. MAX222 RS232 transceiver for board-to-PC communication. Monitors three vital conditions for a microprocessor: power supply, software execution, and external override. Reset output is active High.

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