Re: Waveform Generators - Any interest in BULK board / enclosure purchase ? ? ?

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: Jan Wagner <jwagner-at-cc.hut.fi> 

Hi Dan,

 > Original poster: "Eastern Voltage Research Corporation" 
<dhmccauley-at-easternvoltageresearch-dot-com>
 >
 >  I've been thinking about designing a high quality waveform generator for
 >  sometime now and wanted to find out if there is any interest on the
 >  group for possibly a bulk board / front panel purchase.

Great! I've been wanting to build one for maybe a year, based e.g. on
Maxim MAX038 / Harris 8038 or one of ADI's DSPs coupled with a fast
high-resolution DAC, but never got around to even start with the project.
You can count me in on the bulk board buy!

As long as components are off-the shelf stuff and easily obtained e.g. as
samples, or are not prohibitively expensive (though all that is rather
obvious for getting more boards out :-))

 >  Basically, I would propose designing a PCB board and also a customized
 >  front panel (to fit a nice off-the-shelf Hammond enclosure box) and
 >  sell them together.
 >
 >  The function generator would basically have:
 >  Sine Wave
 >  Square Wave
 >  Triangle Wave
 >  Pulse (adj Duty)
 >  Sawtooth Wave
 >
 >  Initially 0-5VDC with adjustable OFFSET output with the possibility of
 >  going with a power stage for high voltage output. It would also be PLL
 >  synthesized with a crystal for high accuracy and possibly an LCD PIC
 >  interface.

Ditto. A nice bench top signal generator.
Maybe make it dual output, one inverted. If additionally the outputs were
floating (not common ground, e.g. use differential driving of the output
stages) and could do like +-12VDC/1.0us that'd be a VERY handy bonus for
SSTCs :)

Anyway - what frequency range did you have in mind? At least DC to a few
MHz? <1% THD+N?

And did you plan to use the PLL for dividing down a, say, standard
cheap 50.000MHz +-200ppm xtal osc clock to get a more accurate reference /
base clock? Or some other purpose?

(extending the freq range could be accomplished with an upwards mixer
after the basic signal generator stage, so it preserves
sine/triangle/pulse/... Though I'm not sure how filtering out of
harmonics etc would be done best)

Anyways, should you need help/work-sharing for coding or PCB or circuit
design, you can count me in.

cheers,
  - Jan

--
****************************************************
  Helsinki University of Technology
  Dept. of Electrical and Communications Engineering
  http://www.hut.fi/~jwagner/ -