Sensitive 'Loudness Detector'

Hi all,

I recently needed to build a sensitive ‘loudness detector’ for environment sound level sensing based project. I had the microphone part covered with my previous project [http://kehribar.me/hardware/electretAmplifier/] but level sensing part is left to do. I could use microcontroller to do the work in software but I wanted to have a relatively low power solution. Eventually, I had to build a single supply envelope detector.

Actually, that electret amplifier board itself have onboard diode + RC filter based passive envelope detector which can be used for level sensing purposes.

On the other hand, it doesn’t work good with low sound levels since the diode has ~0.6V drop. Standard solution is to use an op-amp as a super diode which all the examples on the web works quite OK if you have bipolar power supply rail. I wanted to have a single supply precision rectifier but couldn’t find too much information on the web, therefore I’m sharing the solution that I’ve come up with.

Output of the electret amplifier board sit around ~1V generated from [mic bias voltage / 2]. Initially I set the DC level of the input signal to VREF via R1 and C1. The two basically creates a high pass filter. Values are R1: 47k, C1: 0.1uF After the signal properly biased to the half supply, it is applied to the precision rectifier. I used regular 1N4148 for D1. Only difference from the existing solution is that R2 and C2 is going to VREF line instead of GND. R2 and C2 decides the responsiveness of the level detection. I used C2: 47uF and R2: ~100k to get a slow and steady response. One can play with the values of R2 and C2 to get much faster attack time.

I used half of MCP6002 to do the rectification and other half for generating VREF = VCC/2 voltage. I used R3,R4: 47k and C3: 10uF.

Overall circuit consumes around ~0.8 mA of current with the electret amplifier board as well. It can be considered as low power for a particular application. You can see the board in action from the video below.

video

I build the board on a perfboard which you can see the details below.

ihsan.