Assignment 5: Make something involving circuit design
For this assignment, I built the
circuits for the biometric sensors I will be using for my final
project. I built amplifiers circuitry for the EKG, galvanic skin response (skin
conductance), and temperature sensors for the patient monitor (the
circuits that I used was designed by Vadim Gerasimov, who I thank for
providing detailed explanations of how the circuits work). For most
of the amplifier circuitry, I used the Burr-Brown
4336 quad op-amp parts.
For the temperature sensor, I used the National Semiconductor LM35
precision temperature sensor, which is nice because it does not require any
explicit calibration, accurate to +/- 1/4 degree (centigrade), and is
low-power. The precision temperature amplifier is instantiated with
just a standard op amp, using precision (1%) resistors, since I am
interested in getting precise values off the sensor.
The GSR sensor basically measure the skin conductance/resistance between
two electrodes. The circuit basically instantiates a wheatstone bridge
to find the unknown skin resistance value.
Here's a scan of the temperature and gsr circuits:
The EKG is the most tricky to get right, because of the very
small potentials involved (on the order of mVs) as well as
susceptibility to noise. For this I used the INA321
Burr-Brown instrumentation amplifier, in conjuction with a couple
of other op-amps for filtering. The differential amplifier gets rid
of the common mode noise, and an additional amplifer is used to hi-pass
filter the signal to get rid of the dc bias. The resulting signal is
then further amplified by another op-amp set up to as a low-pass filter
to get the final signal for the hoarder.
The circuitry for the EKG took a very long time to get working for my final project. One of the problems why it
took longer to get the EKG working was the design for the EKG was more
complicated than the GSR/temperature sensors, and there was much
more debug required to get the circuits working given that the surface
mount parts were very difficult solder on correctly without bridges
and other hard-to-see mistakes.
Here's a scan of the ekg circuit:

