CircuitGeek, Author at Do It Easy With ScienceProg

Build a powerful bi-directional 2.4 GHz amplifier for less than $100

Would you want to add a bi-directional 2.4GHz amplifier to your proxim Symphony with less than $100? If you nodded your head, then pay attention to this project, as this will benefit you in the long run…

Ok, the meaning for bi-directional means you can simply mount the amplifier at the antenna, which this help to overcome any cable loss. In addition to it, the amplifier also can automatically switch between receive and transmit modes.

Some of the components you needed:

Non-isolated AC to DC power supply

This simple power supply circuit can reduce the voltage from 20vac to 120vac into 5 volts DC and provide current up to 100mA. [Link]

DC servo motor driver

Architecture of a Typical Microcontroller

Microcontrollers are the building blocks of any digital signal processing system. In layman’s terms, they can be described as miniature computers that are present on chips. They consume very little amount of power and are self sufficient. They are similar to microprocessors but contain some additional elements such as read only memory in the form of EEPROM (Electrical Programmable Read Only Memory) and a read write memory that usually utilises flash technology. Another difference between microcontrollers and microprocessors is the clock speed. Microcontrollers usually operate at low clock speeds. Low clock speeds are adopted as they are suitable for the operations that are usually performed using microcontrollers. Also, this ensures that they consume less power.

About Digital Signal Processing

Today, signals, i.e., quantities that fluctuate over time with high frequency, have acquired a great amount of importance and are being used in many fields, especially communication. Digital signal processing involves converting digital data into signals, making its transfer easier and subsequently converting these signals back into the original form. A signal has many characteristics or domains such as time domain, spatial domain, frequency, wavelet domain, etc. Anyone among these can be used to process a respective signal. From among these, the engineer usually selects the one that best represents the characteristics of the signal concerned or, in other words, the one from which data can be obtained easily. To ascertain the required characteristic, the engineer may try out many among these properties. The use of signals has gone up especially with the use of computers. Computers can analyze and process only digital (discrete) data and cannot handle analog (continuous) data. Thus, conversion of the signal from analog to the digital form becomes necessary. The digital signal is exactly similar to the analog signal that it has been obtained from; some mathematical techniques such as the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem are used. Usually, after analysis or transformation, the output signal is…