EE 490: Independent Study

Student: Yan Jie Hui

Professor : Dr. Tuttle

Project description:

The goal of this project is to build an organ that will have 3 different color lights that will

flash depending on the music played. To build this circuit we are going to needed skills learned

in different circuits classes, knowledge of op-amps, comparators, filters, and circuit design are

some of the necessary concepts to know.

Development of the project:

The first step was to understand how the circuit had to be built and its parts, so the design

of the circuit could be defined. The way I decided to proceed was to build each smaller part of

the whole circuit and make sure they all worked alone, so then put all the parts together and test

it.

The following are the parts of the circuit

1- Amplifier

The design of the amplifier was simple, it was only needed to amplify signal of music,

because it was weak. Inverting op amp design:

2- The Filters

Building the filters were not that hard, however it was time consuming to design them,

because they were an active second degree filters, so the design had 2 capacitors and 2

resistors that could change values to modify the cut off frequency, the gain and how

narrow it would filter. I created a excel sheet that I could plug in the values of the

different components and they would give me the parameters of the filter. (excel will the

attached to this report). During the tests the range of frequencies that were found the be

appropriated for bass, mid range and high pitch were: 160Hz, 1600Hz and 4250Hz, these

values were picked to make the selection of the capacitors and resistors easier.
 3- Comparators

The design of the comparators were not complicated because op-amps were used to build

them. One terminal was the input coming from the filters and the other terminal was the

reference voltage to turn on the LEDs. It just required some patience to connect all 12

comparators in the circuit, because they were 4 levels for each frequency.

Putting everything together:

There were 3 parts main parts, and other smaller branches to complete the circuit. First

the music input goes through an amplifier, second, the filter splits it in to 3 frequencies, third, the

comparators will read the magnitude of each frequency and decide if it will turn on or not the

LEDs. Another smaller part was the Vref of the comparators, the voltages were created by

simply putting 1k resistors in series to create 1, 2, 3 and 4 volts.

Circuit Diagram: