Simple sound pulse (or frequency) to voltage for switch

dcsound

I am building a tiny project using an android phone — it simply has to drive a transistor switch on and off. Instead of going down the route of trying to interface to a micro controller via USB/Bluetooth, etc., I thought it would be easy to drive the switch through the headphone jack: play a sound through the jack and have the sound translated into a DC voltage that can drive the transistor.

I found this post, but it didn't seem to lead anywhere.

EDIT: A bit more searching led me to an LM2907, which seems like it might do the trick.

Best Answer

The signal from the headphone socket on the android may be enough to activate a transistor or, it may not be enough without resorting to some form of voltage amplification. Given that you probably won't want to use a small battery to power the amplifier it may be sensible to consider a small voltage step-up transformer. It may not work effectively at bass frequencies but it should be able to be made small enough for operating at mid-range audio frequencies. The output would need to be rectified and smoothed and then fed to the base of a BJT via a base resistor. It may be suitable for a MOSFET too.

Another option is an energy harvesting chip such as: -

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This will take the rectified and smoothed signal from a low voltage audio device and convert it to a voltage suitable for turning on a mosfet.

An LM2907 is unsuitable for turning a small dc voltage (rectified audio) into a voltage suitable for driving a BJT or mosfet - it needs a power supply to operate and it's applications are not in this field.