Yesterday’s high-side DC power control circuit was not able to measure current in a very exact way. Each ADC step is about 3.3mv, and with a 0.1 Ω sense resistor, that translates to 33 mA steps (a bit less, now that the MOSFET turns out to have a slighty higher “on” resistance).

So let’s add an op-amp, to amplify the voltage:

That’s a standard way to amplify an input voltage by a factor of 11, so a 0.3V input should generate a 3.3V output voltage, which is nicely full-scale for the ATmega’s analog input when running at 3.3V.

But there’s a little mistake in this setup…

The voltage we’re measuring is not a small voltage above 0V, but a small voltage below 3.3V, so we’re in fact feeding the op-amp a voltage between about 3.0V and 3.3V. Amplified by 11 you get… something the op-amp can’t handle when powered from 3.3V, so it’ll simply return 3.3V all the time. Overflow!

Simple to fix though. Instead of tying that lower resistor to ground, we tie it to 3.3V as reference level. And lo and behold, I’m seeing a roughly 11x larger reading with the same setup as yesterday:

Now, the input voltage swings between about 2.4V and 3.3V, which is just fine as analog input.

The one thing to watch out for is that we’re sailing very close to the edge, or in op-amp speak: “close to the rail”. This circuit is working with an input voltage which is very close to the +3.3V power supply “rail”, and the output of the op-amp also needs to be able to swing up to that same +3.3V level. This requires some care in selecting a “RRIO” type op-amp (i.e. Rail-to-Rail Input and Output) – the chip I used here is the TLV2373, a dual op-aamp. It does fairly well, but the output can’t quite totally reach 0V or 3.3V. I suspect that most op-amps will have this problem: a tiny residual voltage on both sides of the output swing. Such is life, no op-amp is perfect.

Here is the test sketch I used for this experiment:

It’s set up for 4 channels, although this circuit only has one. This could be used as the basis for a 2-channel plug, since both the MOSFET and the op-amp are dual-channel.

The output measurements come in via wireless every 5 seconds, and a simple “1,21s” sent out to it (since this is node 21) will turn on the disk.

But this code doesn’t even come close to what I’d really like to implement: it needs to track power use, only switch off when a device is consistently below a preset level (could be different for each device), implement encryption to prevent unauthorized control, store settings in EEPROM, support configurable behavior after power loss, and power devices up in a staggered mode to reduce the load on the power supply, oh my – not there yet!