I'm working on a project that involves reading battery voltage via a headphone/microphone jack. The batteries will vary between 3.0 - 3.6V. I'd like to convert that voltage to a frequency (linearly if possible) and perform an FFT on the signal to pull read the voltage from it. Since the headphone/microphone jack uses a sampling rate of 44kHz, I'm limited to an upper bound of about 20kHz. This is the maximum output frequency I can generate from the headphone outputs, or read in with the microphone.
I first looked at a LM331, but it cannot operate at the low voltage I'm using. Next, I looked at the AD7740, but its input clock requires a 32KhZ minimum input reference clock, so I could not generate that using my system.
Since it's looking like I cannot get a continuous mapping of voltages to a range of frequencies, I'm deciding upon using a series of high precision zener diodes that will enable different resistors to be used in a LMC555 astable oscillator circuit. This way, I'll know if the battery voltage is 3.0-3.2V, 3.2-3.4V or 3.4-3.6V. Each Zener will have a different resistor, and the resultant 555 square wave will be filtered to eliminate higher harmonics, then fed into the microphone and a FFT will be performed.
Example: 3.0-3.2V = 1kHz. 3.2-3.4V = 2kHz. 3.4-3.6V = 3 kHz
I've come to stackexchange to ask if anyone knows of a better way, such that I could achieve my original goals of a linear map of voltages to frequencies? (keeping in mind the constraints)