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. So-called 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

Precision Full Wave Rectifier. Ideal for low input signals

rectification.

6kHZNOTCH

The twin T notch filter is used to block an unwanted 6kHz

frequency.

AMPBLOCK

Buffered amplifier building block with gain pin. Buffer is used to

minimize insertion loss of a Twin T.

COMM

Communication block.
DS3695 RS485 transceiver for board-to-board communication.
MAX222 RS232 transceiver for board-to-PC communication.

RESET

Monitors three vital conditions for a microprocessor: power supply,

software execution, and external override. Reset output is active
High.