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EZVD - Easy Voltage-Divider Calc-/Simulator

When you migrate from just learning by copying open-source hardware designs/schematics towards creating your own electronic designs and solutions, you'll sooner or later will be confronted with the task of designing and selecting the right resistors for a certain voltage divider.

In the past, online-tools like this have been a great companion in the process, however, a little research showed that this is really not as trivial as it may seem in the beginning, especially when used as an input divider for an ADC.

EZVD Output on the console (python/ncurses)

EZVD was born out of the necessity to have a paperless math proving ground that should be easily hackable and fun to play with various math models and parameters. Python seemed like a logical choice to rebuild the whole division/conversion/calculation chain from input voltage to predicted decimal output for a given ADC resolution.

With EZVD you can simulate and instantly assert your design choices and get warnings for certain constraints you can set:

  • Power Efficiency (how much power will it cost to drive the divider)
  • Design Efficiency Indicator Bar (maximum resolution vs. clipping)
  • Analog Reference Voltage (ADC)
  • VD output impedance (to match ADC input muxer circuit, which lowers the ADC input impedance)
  • Simultaneous Overview for most common ADCs (8,10,12 and 16 Bit)
  • Have consistent/tested copy-paste math blocks to use in firmware development

It's still a very hackish and early implementation but it (or the idea of it) might serve well to re-verify and extend its math model, functionality and robustness (there are still some uncaught cases where EZVD will crash with large step sizes) and to create more open simulation/calculation tools which make electronics engineering more fun and may help us all to reduce design failure risks by mis-aligning a simple voltage divider where a calculator/simulator can show us the way.

Installation

Dependencies

  • Python 3.x for full UTF support

Clone repo

$ git clone https://github.com/apollo-ng/ezvd.git
$ cd ezvd

Run

$ ./ezvd.py

Development / Sources / Issue-Tracking

People are fighting board-wars over the 1024 vs. 1023 multiplier issue and a lot of code out there one could use as an example bears the risk of also just being copy-pasted from some other bad example. So anyone with the skill to provide knowledge, reflection, verification and feature expansion is invited to join development, so that we all can have an open and verified simulation/calculation tool basis to work with. Feedback, PR's and everything else that might increase precision/usability are, as always, very welcome:

https://github.com/apollo-ng/ezvd

Roadmap

  • Reverse Finding of optimal resistor values for given inputs

License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.