System Description
Principle of Operation:
The basic principle of operation is to measure the current that flows
in the antenna when it is excited by a constant voltage. In order
to achieve simple high-performance current measurement, the excitation
signal is used as the ground of the measurement circuitry
. After conditioning and digitization, the signal is
re-referenced to earth ground using opto-isolation.
There are five main parts of the system:
- The generator generates
an 18 volt peak-to-peak pseudo-random
signal and a floating 8 volt DC supply referenced to this signal which
is used to power the measurement and antenna units.
- The antenna units which
sense the capacitance using an antenna plate, transimpedance amplifier
and gain
stage/buffer.
- The measurement unit, which
synchronously demodulates the antenna unit output, digitizes it and
level-shifts it to the earth-ground reference. The measurement
unit can acquire seven antenna inputs.
- The controller
sequences the digitization, then decimates the signals 7x to 20.7
samples/sec. This data is then transmitted over a RS232 link to a
Matlab application running on a PC.
- The host PC provides
additional signal processing and display.
block diagram
Generator:
Since one generator can supply several measurement units and many
antenna units, only one was needed for testing, so I used a hand-wired
prototype:
The pseudo-random noise generator is a top left. The
pseudo-random signal is a 12 bit M-sequence with 10Hz repetition
rate. Choosing a repetition rate that falls above the
system bandwidth (1.5 Hz) insures that there are no low frequency
components which can leak into the output.
The PN sequence is then Manchester encoded to shift the PN spectrum
away from
DC. By exclusive-or'ing with the clock, Manchester (or bi-phase)
encoding turns the PN sequence which has long runs of zero and one bits
into a sequence which only has runs of one or two bits:
The half-bridge output stage is center left on the board, with the
output coupling
capacitor and filter below. A low-Q 2-pole RLC low-pass filter is
used at the output to minimize RFI due to the PN sequence
harmonics. The filtered output waveform looks like this
(note different time scale):
This is the generator output spectrum:
The right half of the generator board is power supply components.
The
entire capacitive sensor system operates off of 24 V DC supplied to the
generator unit. A linear regulator drops this to 20 V for the
output stage, and a switching regulator module generates 8 V DC for
supplying the rest of the electronics. Since no dielectric
isolation is required between the floating supply (referenced to the
generator output) and the input power, and since there is no DC
component in the output signal, isolation of the floating supply is
done using a common-mode filter inductor, and no DC-DC converter is
required.
PN generator schematic
generator output driver schematic
generator power supply schematic
Antenna Unit:
The antenna unit is constructed on a dual-sided PCB, the back side of
which is dedicated to a ground plane. Since the measurement
ground is the excitation signal, this plane serves as a guard which
bootstraps the capacitance of the supporting structure, and also gives
the sensor some degree of directionality. One of the
characteristics of capacitive sensors is low
directionality. This can be an advantage in close-in proximity
sensing because objects cannot fall in a blind spot between the fields
of view of adjacent sensors. The sensor plate is visible on the
front of the board, and is 14 x 56 mm.
Antenna unit schematic (pdf)
Signal conditioning electronics on the antenna unit function as a
frequency selective current-to-voltage
converter with transimpedance gain of 1 megohm (one volt per
microamp.) A dual 40 MHz CMOS opamp is used to implement a
transimpedance stage and a gain/buffer stage.
This is the receive frequency response, including the inherent single
zero high-pass effect of the capacitive coupling:
The operating
spectrum is centered on 80 kHz, with a
3 dB bandwidth of 200 kHz. The bandwidth is set using first-order
RC sections, both
for
simplicity and also to give a stable frequency response.
Due the
broad spread spectrum of the excitation, a high-Q bandpass filter is
not desirable. High Q filters would also contribute to phase and
amplitude mismatch between the channels. The receive bandwidth is
made wider than the transmit spectrum, also
to limit the effect of filter drift on the received amplitude.
Four antenna units are connected to a 8 conductor mass-terminated IDC
ribbon cable. Each sensor is "programmed" for its channel by
removing 3 of the four possible output pins from the
connector. The test antenna assembly has three antenna
units mounted on an aluminum bar, which is also connected to the
excitation signal:
The spacing between the antenna units is 60 cm.
Measurement Unit:
The functions of the measurement unit are: demodulation,
phase/amplitude reference, digitization and level shifting. The
measurement unit is constructed on a dual-sided PCB, with the
back side largely dedicated to a ground plane/guard.
Measure unit schematic (pdf)
The daughter-board at top is the reference channel, which differs only
from the active antenna units in that the input is connected to a
capacitive divider rather than to the antenna patch. The
capacitive divider and the reference clock generator are underneath the
dummy antenna board. A comparator driven off of the reference
channel
output drives all of the demodulators, insuring the correct phase
relationship between the excitation and the demodulator
clock. The equivalent capacitance of the reference channel
is 240 femto-Farads, which is near full scale. In later digital
processing, the reference channel amplitude is used to normalize the
other signals, resulting in ratiometric operation that is insensitive
to variations such as changes in the generator level or ADC reference.
Five of the eight
demodulator sections are visible on the left, next to the connectors
for two antenna unit strings. There are only seven sensor
channels
because one of the demodulators is used for the reference
channel. The
synchronous demodulator is implemented using a CMOS switch, with an RC
combination used to reconstruct the level, giving a 2.5 Hz -3dB point.
The demodulator outputs are multiplexed, then digitized using a 24 bit
sigma-delta ADC. Each channel is sampled at 145
samples/sec. The oversampling allows later digital filtration to
improve the selectivity. The sampling rate is chosen so that the
first few 60 Hz harmonics do not fall in aliases of the system
passband, further improving rejection of power line harmonics.
The ADC is mounted on the underside of
the board, as are other SMT components such as decoupling capacitors.
At the lower right is the opto-isolation section which converts from
the floating ground (the excitation signal) to the earth referenced
ground used at the output. The large blue right side connector
goes to the
controller card, and the small connector goes to the generator. A
5 volt regulator is also hidden by the reference channel board.
Assembly with Controller:
This image shows the complete assembly of all the electronics,
excluding the antennas:
The controller board is in the
center. The reference channel card
on the measurement unit is covered with a shield panel to eliminate
residual capacitance
sensitivity. Other than this, the system operates without
any shielding, despite the location of picoamp/microvolt sensitive
circuits near power and digital electronics.
A commercial AVR 8-bit microcontroller development board was used as
the controller. Only the microcontroller itself and the RS232 interface
are used, and
in a production version, it would make sense to place the controller
chip on the measurement unit and do level shifting at the serial or
network interface.
In addition to sequencing the ADC and multiplexer on the measurement
unit, the controller also decimates the the ADC data using a 6'th order
butterworth IIR filter with cutoff set at 4 Hz. The data output
rate is 145/7 samples/sec (about 21 samples/sec.)
Host PC:
In additional to collection and display of experimental data, the host
PC does some signal processing. A 1.5 Hz low-pass FIR filter is
used to establish the final system bandwidth. The system
bandwidth is a tradeoff between response time and noise
rejection. The bandwidth was chosen to be as narrow as possible
while still giving a response time of about 1/2 second.
The host PC also subtracts out the background capacitance to allow the
influence of objects to be easily seen. Background subtraction is
done by taking the minimum reading in a time window and using that as
the zero value.
My homepage | Up | Prev | Next | email