- Thu Jul 06, 2017 10:23 pm
#195487
Hello everyone,
I'm a mechanical engineer by day, by I have gotten into the field of robotics as a hobby. This has led me to take up my first major electrical component design: a circuit to provide a 0-5v DC signal indicating proximity to an off-the-shelf invisible dog fence made by Pet Safe. Using an oscilloscope, I have determined that the fence operates at 10.8kHz. I have designed and breadboarded the following circuit to detect the fence. I'd like to turn this into a PCB, but before I do so, I was hoping to get some advice from more experienced electrical engineers. Are there any glaring mistakes I've made in the design?
I have actually created two identical breadboard versions of this schematic, but their performance is substantially different. I'm hoping the jump to PCB will fix some of the discrepancy. One of the hard parts initially was finding the right combo of inductor and capacitor to give a close resonance match. Would I be better off incorporating a trim capacitor? The best combo I could find from Mouser components uses a large 100mH inductor. Would I be better served using a smaller inductor? I noticed that the dog collar that came with the fence uses much smaller inductors.
Thanks in advance for any help you can offer!
[Here's where I wanted to attach my schematic as an image or PDF file, but apparently I need administrator approval to do so...]
-Chris
I'm a mechanical engineer by day, by I have gotten into the field of robotics as a hobby. This has led me to take up my first major electrical component design: a circuit to provide a 0-5v DC signal indicating proximity to an off-the-shelf invisible dog fence made by Pet Safe. Using an oscilloscope, I have determined that the fence operates at 10.8kHz. I have designed and breadboarded the following circuit to detect the fence. I'd like to turn this into a PCB, but before I do so, I was hoping to get some advice from more experienced electrical engineers. Are there any glaring mistakes I've made in the design?
I have actually created two identical breadboard versions of this schematic, but their performance is substantially different. I'm hoping the jump to PCB will fix some of the discrepancy. One of the hard parts initially was finding the right combo of inductor and capacitor to give a close resonance match. Would I be better off incorporating a trim capacitor? The best combo I could find from Mouser components uses a large 100mH inductor. Would I be better served using a smaller inductor? I noticed that the dog collar that came with the fence uses much smaller inductors.
Thanks in advance for any help you can offer!
[Here's where I wanted to attach my schematic as an image or PDF file, but apparently I need administrator approval to do so...]
-Chris