Hello everyone,
I'm working on an automotive project where I need to send both data and power between two points. The only problem is there's only 2 wires (+12V and GND) to work with. These wires are molded in fiberglass, and there's no way to extend/expand them to include data lines.
My original though was to build a square wave generator where I could encode binary "0", "1", and "No data" by varying the width of the pulses, and I could add a rectifier/capacitor on the receiving end to recover a useable DC signal to power the existing electronics, and use an opto-isolator before that to recover the signal for processing with a microcontroller. The receiving end needs about 2-3 amps of current, so I was thinking to switch the 12VDC at the source using a MOSFET fed from a microcontroller via another opto-isolator or buffer IC.
Can anyone else chime in? I can't decide if I should try this using a variation of the above method, or if I should just use a short range RF transmitter/receiver pair to send the data.
I'm working on an automotive project where I need to send both data and power between two points. The only problem is there's only 2 wires (+12V and GND) to work with. These wires are molded in fiberglass, and there's no way to extend/expand them to include data lines.
My original though was to build a square wave generator where I could encode binary "0", "1", and "No data" by varying the width of the pulses, and I could add a rectifier/capacitor on the receiving end to recover a useable DC signal to power the existing electronics, and use an opto-isolator before that to recover the signal for processing with a microcontroller. The receiving end needs about 2-3 amps of current, so I was thinking to switch the 12VDC at the source using a MOSFET fed from a microcontroller via another opto-isolator or buffer IC.
Can anyone else chime in? I can't decide if I should try this using a variation of the above method, or if I should just use a short range RF transmitter/receiver pair to send the data.