Electrical – circuit to measure positive & negative voltage + Vref resolution

adcarduinoinstrumentation-amplifieroperational-amplifiervoltage measurement

i would like to make a "voltmeter" to read from +2V to -2V and connect it to an Arduino ADC ( 0V to 5V ).
I found different configurations for do this job:

  1. From this site:
    enter image description here

  2. Bipolar to unipolar converter, a summing amp:
    enter image description here

  3. Instrumental amp, base on this schematic ( ECG ):
    enter image description here

The last approach use:
– instrumental amp
– full-wave rectifier
– low pass filter
– inverting opamp + gain

The signal i need to read it's "stable", the ECG circuit i suppose it's too complex for this job. But i'm interested to compare the instrumental amp Vs opamp.

What is the best configuration for my porspose?

For the Vref, I have this question:

In this video & this article are show how it works.
In the article he say, for example:
Vref at 5v -> 0-5 V has 4.9 mV resolution
Vref at 3.3v -> 0-3.3 has 3.2mV resolution
But in the video does not say that, he used Vref at 1.1v and apparently does not have any problem…. probably the solution is here in the code.

Best Answer

This does not directly answer your question but may give you an idea for a different solution.

schematic

simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab

Figure 1. The simplest offset adjust.

If you can live with reduced resolution on the ADC the circuit of Figure 1 may be acceptable.

Vin       Vout
-2 V      +1.5 V
 0 V      +2.5 V
+2 V      +3.5 V

It reduces the 5 V span to only 2 V with the resistor arrangement shown.

I think the best span you can get with this arrangement will be by reducing R1 to 2k. With this ratio the ADC starts at 0 V.

Vin       Vout
-2 V       0 V
 0 V      +1.428 V
+2 V      +2.857 V

You can scale the resistors to suit. The ratio is what is important.

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