Electrical – Isolated 1-10V (or 0-10V) output

dc/dc converterisolationoperational-amplifieropto-isolator

I need to control an LED driver with analog 0(1)-10V control input.

This control device should be very cheap and compact so until now I made a schematic which uses the fact that those drivers have 100 uA current source at its dimming input. Switching capacitor made this cheap, small and relatively easy.

But now I need to adapt this solution for a driver which has "400…550 uA current at control pin". This is a problem for several reasons:

  • I need to drive about 5…10-times more current in the primary circuit which becomes 4-5 mA (I don't have so much current)
  • Switching capacitance schematic gives a voltage depending on a current. So if this current isn't precise – my voltage will be not precise as well

I'd like to avoid any isolated DC-DC with opamps solutions as this will be big and expensive.

Is there any better solutions?

Best Answer

I'm not sure I'm following what all of your constraints are, but my first thought would be something like this:

schematic

simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab

This is similar to the previous idea, but it now uses an LMV431 shunt regulator to deal with the variability of the current source. If the switching frequency is zero, the control voltage will be 1.25V, and as you increase the switching frequency, the control voltage will rise.