Arduino Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 9: A new hardware

My first wind meter prototype is kind of working. The software will need improvement to make this wind meter into something really useful. But both hardware and software are basically functional and can be built up upon.

If you’re new here, you might want to check out the overview over this series of posts on the arduino-based ultrasonic anemometer:

The new ultrasonic wind meter Arduino shield

The next thing I will do is re-design the entire hardware. Instead of two distinct boards with wires all over the place I will design a single, standard-sized Arduino Shield that can be stacked on an Arduino Uno. Just like any of those commercially available shields that add motor control, Ethernet or whatever. That will make the whole setup much smaller and simpler. And I hope this will also make it easier for others (like you?) who want to build their own.

This re-design is what I’m going to talk about today so I guess there won’t be much in the way of photos, just some schematics and board layouts. And I’ll put all the Eagle files on the overview page as a zip download. Here’s what I’ve changed and why:

Power supply

The first version used the (unregulated) Vin of the Arduino so it had a linear 5V regulator of its own. On top of that there was also a flying capacitor type inverter to generate a -5V rail for the analog multiplexer. Both of these chips have been eliminated. I’m now using the the 5V rail straight from the Arduino, there is just a 100uF tantal input cap. The -5V is no longer needed by the multiplexer. I’ll later explain why.

Signal routing / pulse generation / drive

The drivers are entirely new: I’ve replaced the two 74HC368 inverters with a single 74HC126 non-inverting line driver / buffer. It has four 3-state buffers, one for each transducer. The negative pin of each transducer is simply grounded in the new design. That costs us half the signal amplitude but simplifies things greatly. And our two-stage amplifier should have more than enough gain to make up for that.

As suggested earlier, there is only a single 74HC4052 left (instead of 3). We will get some crosstalk issues but we’re always transmitting or receiving, never both at the same time. Plus, the tuned amplifier filters out most of that high frequency stuff (such as square waves). And we have the option to mute the amplifier, this time both at the input as well as on the output. Not sure if we’ll need it, I’ll check once everything else is working.

Permanently grounding the negative pin of the transducers means we only have four signals to worry about. So I’m only using half of the 4052 to chose exactly one of the four signals. Y0, Y1, Y2, Y3 as inputs from the four transducers and Y as output that goes to the amplifier.

But why don’t I need the -5V anymore? Here is why. In my first design I routed the signal from the transducers straight through the 4052. Because this signal swings around ground, it will be negative half of the time and positive the other half. So I needed both a negative and a positive supply. Later, that signal was capacitively coupled into the amplifier where it was biased so somewhere around 2.3 volts. Now I already do the biasing before the 4052. So the signal will be positive at all times and hence there’s no longer a need for a negative voltage. I find this a really elegant solution, I just hope it will work 😉

There is still an Axis and Direction signal controlling a 74HC139 encoder generating the enable signals for the transducer drivers / output buffers. I had LEDs on these enable signals in the first version, these are no longer present. The software changes the axis/direction every 2ms so you won’t be able to see anything now.

The 74HC126 has active high enable signals (as opposed to the 125 which is otherwise identical). Since all but one enable signals are high, only one transducer can float freely. That’s our receiving transducer. That also means that the other 3 transducers are actively driven so only one of them must receive the PWM signal.

This is how I’ve solved this: As I said, I only used half of the 4052 for the tranducer signals. So the other half can be used to route the PWM signal from the Arduino to the correct output buffer. So the signal from the Arduino is connected to the input X and the outputs X0, X1, X2, X3 carry the signal to the different gates of the 74HC126. There is one potential problem: The outputs that are not selected are floating freely so there are 10k pull-down resistors on X0, X1, X2 and X3.

So from the 8 large ICs on the first version, only 3 are left. That saves plenty of board space so we can fit our circuit on a standard sized Arduino shield.

Same board from the other side


The basic design with two stages of tuned common emitter amplifiers with NPN darlington pairs has worked well so I’ll stick to that.

The main shortcoming of my first version was the 47uH plus 330nF LC tank (see part 4) so I’m changing that to 1mH plus 15.82nF. Same resonant frequency but much higher impedance. The inductor I’ve chosen has a dc resistance of a bit more than 16 ohms which will give a Q-factor of around 15 – comfortable for our application.

The main change is the biasing. A wind meter will be deployed outside so it is likely to see great variation in temperature. So the biasing of our amplifier and thus the quiscent current need to be stable over a wide temperature range. Two things make this a difficult task here: First, we’re using darlington pairs which means twice the variation in base-emitter drop. Second, our rather low operating voltage of 5 volts.

A common solution for difficult biasing situations is the use of a matched transistor to generate the base biasing voltage. And that’s what I’ll do here. Each stage has an additional darlington pair with collector and base connected for this purpose. So the collector will always be 2 diode drops (around 1.3V at room temperature) above its emitter. I want the emitter to sit 1V above ground and 1mA of quiscent current. So I add a 1k emitter resistor and a 2.7k collector resistor and get just that.

Base emitter drop will change by about -2mV per degree per transistor. So for a 50 degree increase in change in temperature, the drop accross our darlington pair will change from 1.3V to 1.1V – quite substantial. But quiscent current will only increase to 1.054mA and the emitter will then sit 1.054V above ground. A 5.4% variation for a 50 degree change in temperature. Not bad at all I think.

The last change to the amplifier is that I’ve put the gain limitting resistors (R7 and R12) in series with only the bypass caps (C5 and C10). This will let me change the gain without affecting biasing which is given by R8 and R13.

Zero Crossing Detector (ZCD)

Almost no change here. I’ve only changed my comparator to be a Microchip MCP6561R. It has a worst-case propagation delay of only 80ns which is 100 times faster than the one I used last time. And it’s still cheap: CHF 0.43 at Farnell if you buy 10.

Envelope Detector

I told you earlier that I had some trouble with my last envelope detector which utilized a VCVS active low-pass filter. If I turned up the gain too much I got wild output swings. I found a screen shot of that:

Envelope going wild

Green is the amplifier output. We’re trying to get the envelope of that. But look what happens to the pink line when I turn up the gain. Nothing to do with an envelope. And I would like even more gain to make the envelope use (almost) all of the 0…5 volts range.

I haven’t really understood why that is. Suggestions anyone? The only thing I can think of is the rather narrow gain-bandwidth product of the op amp, 600kHz if I remember correctly.

So I’m using two op-amp buffers, each followed by a normal RC low-pass filter. So I can set any gain I want for the two buffers without affecting the signal shape. As an added benefit, I can now look at the signal after each buffer / filter. I’ve also changed the op-amps to be Microchip MCP601R. Less precise (we don’t need precision here) but fast (2.8MHz) and cheaper.

At the very input of the envelope detector I’m now using a second (not really matched but same type) diode (D2) to produce a bias voltage just a diode drop above ground to precisely compensate for the rectifying diode (D1) of the envelope detector.

The comparator at the output is now a MCP6561R as for the ZCD. Not that we need the speed here, just to use the same type.

Temperature measurement

Everything new here. LMT86 as a temperature sensor. Cheap, works from -50 to +150 degrees centigrade and is accurate to 0.4 degrees. Its output is between 1.5 and 2.5volts over the temperature of interest. It comes in a SC-70 package. That’s a bit small but still hand-solderable without problem.

There is no more op-amp to scale it up but I’ve added a rather precise 2.5V voltage reference, the ADR361. Quite an overkill maybe but I thought if you are measuring wind speed you are likely to also measure things like humidity, pressure, light intensity or something like that. So with the anemometer shield you get a precise and stable reference for all your measurements.


As you can see, I ended up changing quite a lot. When laying out the board I was surprised how easily everything fitted in. Not only did the fewer logic ICs save space themselves, it also greatly simplified signal routing. As you can see from the photos, I’ve already made a board. All the components have arrived as well so I’m ready to go ahead and build it up. I’m really looking forward to seeing how it will perform. I just hope everything works as planned.

All the board and schematic PDFs as well as the Eagle files can be found on the overview page as a .zip file:

That’s it for now, click here for the finished shield:

4 thoughts on “Arduino Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 9: A new hardware”

  1. Reading the Amplifier part where you specify how you corrected your mistake and choose a 1mH inductor and 15.82 nF capacitor. I was just wondering why you tuned so precisely the capacitance even when the typical 10%-20% tolerances of capacitors will inevitably mess with the resonnance frequency quite a bit. By a quick evaluation with 20 %, the frequency should reside anywhere between 36-44 kHz. With your Q factor of 15, there is a chance that the bandwith misses the 40 kHz.

  2. Ha, I didn’t saw you were discussing the tolerance issue several pages after. My Bad, sorry.

  3. Hello, firstly, I am really impressed and interested in your project, I just would like to ask you if you could take a while and make a completty part list or buy list for this project at the final stage of circuit board. I am trying to do so from eagle board but there are not very clear information about used components, or there are multiple options to buy with the same name or just few numbers or letters differs and for me it is really hard task to accomplish.
    thank you have a nice day

    1. Hi Lucas. Thank you for your comment and your interest in the anemometer project. Unfortunately, I also don’t have much more than what’s in the eagle files. They should give you the type and package of each component. Yes, there are often a confusing variety of ICs with the basically same part number. If you have a question about a particular part I will try to find it in my Farnell order history and can tell you for sure. But I don’t keep track of them otherwise. Also, most of the components aren’t that critical and there are a lot of similar components that work just as well.
      And: I’m currently working on a radically revised version so my focus has shifted a bit away from the shield posted a bit more than a year ago.There were some issues that I was unable to resolve entirely so I had to step back and think and am now trying something new that hopefully solves those issues.

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