Voltage Divider

11 October 2018

Categories: Code , Tags: Software, Voltage, Divider

A friend who is studying Engineering at university asked me for help tutoring him for one of his degree projects where he was tasked with writing a voltage divider calculator:

You are required to design a program to calculate the best possible standard resistors to use for a voltage divider circuit to get the required circuit gain. The circuit will contain 2 to 4 resistors as in the following circuit diagram.

Circuit

...

The allowed resistors in kΩ are: 1.0, 1.2, 1.5, 1.8, 2.2, 2.7, 3.3, 3.9, 4.7, 5.6, 6.8, 8.2, 10, 12, 15, 18, 22, 27, 33, 39, 47, 56, 68, 82, 100, 1e9

Note that the last resistor is 1 GΩ, to represent an open circuit. This is allowed because resistors R2 and/or R4 may not be required, in which case they may be replaced by an open circuit. Resistors R1 and R3 cannot be zero. Only resistors R2 and R4 may be this value.

There's some more explanation in the assignment, including information on how to calculate the resistance values p1 and p2, and the gain of the circuit.

In order to be able to help my friend with his assignment, I decided to get my head around the problem by coding it in Javascript. It took about half an hour to throw together a program that somewhat closely resembled what the lecturer is after. I then figured that with the magic of Vue, I should be able to write a component that dynamically calculates the answers as you type in your required gain. Here is the end result:

VOLTAGE DIVIDER

Enter the voltage divider gain ( > 0 to < 1 )


Actual Gain = 0.500000

R1 = 100.0 kohm

R2 = 1000000000.0 kohm

R3 = 100.0 kohm

R4 = 1000000000.0 kohm

P1 = 100.0000 kohm

P2 = 100.0000 kohm

# Code