Hello,
I'm trying to design an ultrasonic range finder using only analog components and that its range will exceed 2m. So far I've designed the Wien Bridge (40Khz), bandpass amplifier, and a sinusoidal to rectangular wave form converter. So what I have in mind is-- The oscillator generates a sinusoidal wave sends it to the bandpass amplifier and from there one input goes to the transmitter and the other goes to the sine to rectangle converter. Now, I'll use a time delay circuit to pulse the rectangular wave (with a delay of about 12ms-- distance/speed of sound--4m/(343m/s), from there i thought to use a comparator to turn the receiver on to wait for a reading. Does anyone know how I can turn the receiver on for just 12ms? On the other side I'll have the sinusoidal wave pulsed all the time. At the receiver end, once it's turned on I want to put a threshold op-amp (not sure on how to implement it, but I'll do some research) and from there to amplifier. Once I have the output voltage readings, I'll use something similar to a voltmeter to read the distance (i.e. just a needle w/distance marks after doing manual measurements). Does that sound a reasonable design? Does anyone can point me to how to go about turning the receiver on/off every ~12ms?
Someone suggested that I'll avoid all that and use frequency sweeping and a frequency to voltage converter, the only thing is that I don't know how to do frequency sweeping in analog, does anyone have any reference for it?
I'll be happy to hear any input/different approach you might have.
Thank you,
A