The picture on the left shows the overall circuitry of the completed low pass filter. It consists of the following part:
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Input filter (5 kHz), switched capacitor filter, clock spike filter (5 kHz), output driver, clock generator circuit and, finally, a simple power supply.
Let us start with the power supply which is rather simple since the 19 inch frame the card mounts in already has a power supply delivering +/-15 V, +5 V (for digital circuitry) and +/-10 V. Since the switched capacitor filter requires a +/-5 V supply, I derive these voltages from the +/-15 V supply using to constant voltage regulator ICs.
The clock generator is a bit more tricky - since the filter has eight different switch selectable bandwidths, the clock generator must be capable of delivering eight preset frequencies. I decided to use the rather well known XR2206 function generator IC since it is easy to use and does its best to generator a 1:1 duty cycle. The clock generator is shown in the following picture:
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The filter is shown in the next picture. The input signal from the RG-1 can be terminated with a 600 Ohm resistor. After this it is fed into a discrete low pass filter with a cutoff frequency of 5 kHz before being used as input for the MAX293. This IC does not only contain the switched capacitor filter but also a dedicated operational amplifier which is used to implement another discrete filter with a cutoff frequency of 5 kHz. The output of the MAX293 is then fed into a non-inverting amplifier with an amplification rate of about 10 (11 to be exact :-) ). This is the place where the drift compensation occurs - the switched capacitor filter introduced quite a lot of drift. The output of this operational amplifier is then used as the input signal for a voltage divider before being amplified another time by a factor of 10 (11).
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The picture on the right shows the front of the random noise filter. From left to right the following elements can be seen: LED showing that input signal termination is in effect, BNC input jack with termination switch, eight position switch for selecting the desired bandwidth, output amplitude potentiometer and the 4 mm banana jack delivering the output signal.
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The picture on the left shows the output frequency spectrum of the filter being fed with a 100 kHz random noise signal from the RG-1. The filter has been set to a cut off frequency of 1 Hz only (which is what I need for my moving mass excitation computation) - it is incredible how sharp the cutoff point in fact is (and it shows how good the RG-1 is - even at very low frequencies is is a good white noise signal) - the vertical hairline has been set at 1 Hz.
ulmann@analogmuseum.org
21-JAN-2007
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