[time-nuts] Simple AC mains zero-cross detector
Charles Steinmetz
csteinmetz at yandex.com
Thu Dec 18 21:16:51 UTC 2014
Gary <nuts at lazygranch.com> wrote:
>Why not use a lower voltage transformer, preferably not at a lethal
>voltage. You only need a couple of volts to drive the rest of the
>circuit.
As you can see from the schematic, the voltage is diode-clamped
almost immediately to ~ +/- 1.5v. The reason for using a 120v
winding is to take advantage of the free slope enhancement provided
by the higher voltage. The 120v winding provides a signal with a
zero-cross slew rate of ~65mV/uS. A 12v winding would slew only
~6.5mV/uS. The faster the slew rate, the more accurately one can
locate the zero crossings.
>If you are going to look at glitches, that should be done by sampling
>the AC (transformer coupled obviously). Basically the circuit to detect
>period is dedicated to that function. Since the frequency won't vary
>significantly, a high order filter wouldn't be an issue, as long as
>you don't care about delay.
You are suggesting two separate data collections, one geared toward
grid frequency and one geared toward glitch detection. That's fine,
and might be preferable if it provided better results than using just
one data collection. But using a higher-order hardware filter does
not provide better frequency determination than post-processing the ZCD data.
The circuit presented allows one data collection to do both functions
well. It has enough filtering to prevent local interference from
corrupting the data, it can locate 60Hz zero crossings to within 1uS
(i.e., frequency resolution significantly better than 0.01 Hz,
single-shot, which can be filtered/averaged to get whatever
resolution you want in post-processing), and it can locate transient
events to within 1uS. Win-win.
Best regards,
Charles
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