Dear all,
Sorry for a sort of low level question, but analog stuff is really not my cup of tea. Still, it seems.
I have a counter set up with an optical sensor that is basically an IR LED and a phototransistor. It is seeing black and white and producing pulses accordingly. The problem is, it has turned out to be a bloody hungry device. It is consuming about 20mA to get the signal up to high level of picaxe working on 2.80V. In my scale, 20mA is a huge tax to pay for this kind of thing. It is probably twice the consumption of 200 components on PCBs, motors and bluetooth module (17mA at full power!) excluding.
Now, I can get it down to sub-mA levels and still get a beautiful square wave on the scope, but this is way too low for picaxe to notice - about 0.6V.
Can I amplify this at lower energy cost than 19mA somehow with as little as possible PCB space taken? Op-amp? Transistor? The frequency is from 15Hz to 330Hz.
Thank you all for your inputs,
Edmunds
Sorry for a sort of low level question, but analog stuff is really not my cup of tea. Still, it seems.
I have a counter set up with an optical sensor that is basically an IR LED and a phototransistor. It is seeing black and white and producing pulses accordingly. The problem is, it has turned out to be a bloody hungry device. It is consuming about 20mA to get the signal up to high level of picaxe working on 2.80V. In my scale, 20mA is a huge tax to pay for this kind of thing. It is probably twice the consumption of 200 components on PCBs, motors and bluetooth module (17mA at full power!) excluding.
Now, I can get it down to sub-mA levels and still get a beautiful square wave on the scope, but this is way too low for picaxe to notice - about 0.6V.
Can I amplify this at lower energy cost than 19mA somehow with as little as possible PCB space taken? Op-amp? Transistor? The frequency is from 15Hz to 330Hz.
Thank you all for your inputs,
Edmunds