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I would like to design a circuit to drive a resistive load (around 3 to 4 ohms) with a maximum current of 2 amps. I want to monitor both voltage and current delivered to the resistive load.

I have designed a first version of the circuit with PWM (20kHz) and a Mosfet. I use a voltage divider to monitor the voltage and an INA169 for the current.

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However, voltage and current measurements contain the PWM signal. I tried to filter the outputs, but the result is not very accurate.

Does someone have a better solution to do the monitoring ? Is it possible not to use PWM without dissipating too much energy ?

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  • \$\begingroup\$ If the PWM is from a microcontroller, and your load can tolerate small bursts of full power, you can implement pulse stretching: Periodically set the duty cycle to 100%, quickly do your measurements, then set the duty cycle back to whatever it's supposed to be. \$\endgroup\$
    – Dampmaskin
    Jan 26, 2017 at 12:27
  • \$\begingroup\$ Thank you for your answer ! I would have to synchronise PWM with analog reading of the microcontroller. It don't feel confortable implementing this solution. \$\endgroup\$
    – Jb.ca
    Jan 26, 2017 at 13:55

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What you have is the basics of a buck converter so, by adding a capacitor, an inductor and a fly-back diode you can significantly reduce the size of the pulses delivered to your load down to a few milli volts peak to peak: -

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Choose L and C so that resonance occurs at a low frequency compared to your switching frequency (maybe 100 Hz).

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