Rongge

This simple circuit enables you to listen to your heartbeat, for instance, while you are exercising. The transducer used for detecting the pulse is an electret microphone, X1 in the diagram. The model used has two (polarized) terminals. As usual with this type of microphone, it functions via a series resistor, R1. The potential drop across this resistor is applied to op amp IC1a via C1. The amplification of the op amp is set to between ´40 and ´1000 with preset P1. Network R4-C3 in the feedback loop of IC1a is a low-pass filter with a cut-off frequency of 34 Hz. Higher frequencies are not needed for the present application. A pulse rate of 180* is equivalent to a frequency of 3 Hz. So as to cater for a wide range of pulse rates, the cut-off frequency is made just over 11 times as high as that representing the highest pulse rate. Operational amplifier IC1c, in conjunction with push-pull am-plifier T1-T2, creates a headphone amplifier, whose output resistance is equivalent to the value...

In this article, an RC oscillator is used as a baud rate generator. If you can calibrate the frequency of such a circuit sufficiently accurately (within a few percent) using a frequency meter, it will work very well. However, it may well drift a bit after some time, and then…. Consequently, here we present a small crystal-controlled oscillator. If you start with a crystal frequency of 2.45765 MHz and divide it by multiples of 2, you can very nicely obtain the well-known baud rates of 9600, 4800, 2400, 600, 300, 150 and 75. If you look closely at this series, you will see that 1200 baud is missing, since divider in the 4060 has no Q10 output! If you do not need 1200 baud, this is not a problem. However, seeing that 1200 baud is used in practice more often than 600 baud, we have put a divide-by-two stage in the circuit after the 4060, in the form of a 74HC74 flip-flop. This yields a similar series of baud rates, in which 600 baud is missing. The trimmer is for the calibration purists; a 3...