I NEED A UNIQUE CIRCUIT DESIGN

What would be the simplest electronic circuit I could construct from typical radio shack components that would detect a pulse beat and activate a 12 VDC bell with each beat?

To the first and/or best design for the above, I'll award a $100 bill within thirty days, which time would allow me the chance to build the circuit and test it to make sure it works. I originally wanted to simply hook into an off-the-shelf blood pressure monitor, but the micro circuitry is just too daunting to mess with, I'm afraid, and I'm thinking that there may be a simpler and easier way by building something from scratch that some electronic wizard knows about that I don't. If such a thing is possible to one of you electronic wizards reading this, I'm all eyes and ears and will award $100 for the disclosure, plus, I'll admire your wizardry for the remainder of my life.

There are plenty of circuits available to do that. First you need a sensor that will detect a pulse (heart beat). Currently they use an IR transmitter / receiver to do that. Most hospitals just clip what looks like a modified clothes pin to the patients finger tip. Give this link a read. The output of the first circuit shown is all you need. A basic amplifier and low pass filter.

Keep in mind normal heart rate of 70 to 90 beats per min. Therefore the best you can hope for is a simple "ding" for each beat. There is no magic or real difficulty and the parts can be had relatively easily.

Ron

Thank you kindly, Ron. You may have solved my dilemma. The Easy Pulse Sensor V1.1 (referenced at the link you provide) comes pre-assembled and tested, and this is probably what I need. Is there any reason why I couldn't hack into the wiring of the LED light that flashes with the pulse beat and amplify that output current (I assume said current, amp-wise, would be pretty weak) for driving, say, a 12 VDC, one or two amp device in addition to, or instead of, the LED that flashes with the pulse beat? If so, this would be the answer to my need. You may have steered me into the perfect device I require. And the price is awesome. Just $20.50 plus postage.

P.S. I did promise $100 for the disclosure. I don't want to insult you, but would you like for me to follow through on that?

Adam Evenson said:

Thank you kindly, Ron. You may have solved my dilemma. The Easy Pulse Sensor V1.1 (referenced at the link you provide) comes pre-assembled and tested, and this is probably what I need. Is there any reason why I couldn't hack into the wiring of the LED light that flashes with the pulse beat and amplify that output current (I assume said current, amp-wise, would be pretty weak) for driving, say, a 12 VDC, one or two amp device in addition to, or instead of, the LED that flashes with the pulse beat? If so, this would be the answer to my need. You may have steered me into the perfect device I require. And the price is awesome. Just $20.50 plus postage.

P.S. I did promise $100 for the disclosure. I don't want to insult you, but would you like for me to follow through on that?

Click to expand...

I don't see why getting the signal off the LED wouldn't work. Should work fine. The overall pulse sensor should be a sort of pre built solution for you, in part anyway.

No, I checked with the wife and we aren't starving. The people in this forum just enjoy trons and helping others. No need for any kind of payment. For me I am retired so it is entertainment away from my other hobby.

Thanks Mr. T for the supporting video which is quite good stuff.

Ron

[Off Topic]
Hi Adam,
it seems you have found a solution to your question pretty quickly, thanks to Ron's and misterT's experience and input.
Members of this forum don't generally accept any form of payment, the information provided is free for anyone to use as they wish and the successful completion of a project is usually reward enough for those giving the assistance.

If you still feel like donating a little something though, there's a great thread posted below, by Ghostman11, which is well worth a read:
https://www.electro-tech-online.com/threads/if-you-could-make-a-difference-would-you.140274/

Regards.
[/Off Topic]

Well, I'm happy to hear you're not starving, Ron, , but since I did issue the promise, I had to follow through, which I was willing to do and be happy about it, as your suggestion won the day for me. Actually, not just a day, it won a lot of years, as I've been toying with this idea that long, but until I reached this certain point I was not ever positive that going to the trouble of constructing it would bear fruit. And for many other reasons the timing was not right. But only in the past several months did everything line up just right, and evidently you, and even this website where I located you, were a part of that "lining up," as the device itself is perfectly what I envisioned all those years ago. Timing can be everything.

This is a great website and the posters seem to be in the same spirit. Thanks to all and special thanks to Ron and Mr. T.

Best regards,

Adam

missed it but this is pretty cool

It is boring to ring a bell with each heartbeat. Ding, ding, ding......
Instead make a siren blast when your heart misses a beat.

That would involve building a missing pulse detector (no pun intended), it would be easier to just replace the bell with a siren and treat it like an everything's OK alarm

Thanks, folks, however, I don't want simply to ring a bell or turn on a light with my pulse beat, but something wholly unrelated to anything like that. My issue is not with my heart health, as mine is superb. To be as candid as possible without giving too much away, my situation is that, among other things, I'm an inventor that was ripped off pretty severely by biggie industrial folks a long time ago--it would break the reader's heart to learn details--and I've been hanging onto this idea for about forty years, waiting for the right moment to spring it. And now is the time. The Big Box Stores made billions from my first inventive effort (for which I obtained patents not worth the paper they were printed on), while I learned some valuable lessons, such as, "Don't step in that trap again!" And, "How to survive on pennies a day for forty years while some criminals get filthy rich." Ha, ha, ha. If all works as planned on this one, I'll control more dough than multiples of the oligarchic, computer whiz-kid teenagers of today. Thus, wish me luck, as I may need it more than I did the last time I developed a billion dollar invention, which, BTW, was also electronic in nature, which prompted the biggies to move in on me and lift it out of my fingers as deftly as one takes candy from a baby. I protested, "But I have patents!" The criminals in white collars laughed and laughed, "Sure you do, kid, and we admire you for it. Keep up the good work!" However, I'm no "baby" any longer, but a much wizened soul now that knows all about how to skip over traps like I fell into the first time.

A postscript: I don't care about monetary wealth as much as I want to get this invention going for myself, as it could be wholly transforming in ways that I can't fully imagine right now. But I'll know more after my research is done, which I've kept even more secret (for forty+ years) than the U.S. government kept the Manhattan Project. I've not told another soul in all this time and I've only cracked open the capsule of secrecy now. In all this time I've not as much as told another soul, "Hey, I've got another great electronic idea!" Huh-uh. I feared the industrialists might hypnotize it out of me or figure out a way to monitor me in my sleep. Thus, the lid on this, my most fantastic invention, has been clamped tight all these years, and I've only cracked it a tiny speck on this forum. Could there be a book in this? Or maybe a song?

Adam Evenson said:

My issue is not with my heart health, as mine is superb.

Click to expand...

My heart health was also superb when I suddenly had a heart attack when two of the arteries that feed blood and oxygen to my heart became blocked.
My wife drove me to the nearby hospital quicker than calling an ambulance and they fixed me immediately. I watched as they put two stents in the blocked arteries and now I am fine.
Now I take a baby Asprin, a blood pressure reducing drug, a drug that strengthens each heartbeat but slows their rate and a drug that reduces cholesterol daily to prevent another heart attack.
I do not eat hamburgers, Kentucky Fried Cholesterol, chocolate, cookies or ice cream anymore. I lost 10 pounds but I was never a fat pig.

I invented a circuit when I was young but did not file for a patent. My invention was seen in a magazine a couple of years later and was given a patent by somebody else.

Wishing you great luck this time Adam!

Ha, ha, ha. Not to quibble or kidnap your verbiage choices unduly, Audioguru, but maybe you should have written, "I believed (or assumed) my heart health was also superb...," as evidently it must not have been . It normally takes a long, long time, often a whole lifetime, of abusing oneself to get arteries into that shape, so it wasn't an instantaneous thing. I'm one of those disgustingly healthy dudes that does his Hatha Yoga exercises every other day, beginning the effort in the summer of 1967, at age 27, and never took a long enough hiatus to make any difference. Imagine how many head stands, shoulder stands, fish's, plows, cobras, bows, twists and locusts (to name only a few) that I've done for myself in nearly fifty years, at a clip of just about every other day, at a minimum, 150 of each per year. By 1968, I'd also stopped doing anything crazy to my health (i.e., committing crimes against it), such as eating animal flesh, smoking cigarettes, drinking insane concoctions such as alcohol, candies, bubble gum and on and on. I've probably ingested five tons of Vitamin C since 1967, among a host of others (a touch of hyperbole here to make a point.) And I do it wisely, with not too much mega-dosing. To the undisciplined, my life would appear too boring to enjoy, but I'm as happy as a riot ALL THE TIME. The deepest Hatha Yoga health is beyond any imagination, even mine. It permeates and conditions everything one is made of, including mental/spiritual attitude. It took me over 30 years of exercising at it regularly to realize that, to any splendid form of human health, regularly exercising with Hatha Yoga is literally as important as proper food, water and air. It's not altogether because I'm inattentive or stupid that it took that long, as I don't know of anybody else that's realized it yet. If anyone had, surely I'd know about it. Thus, it's a pretty deep secret of nature's, one of the deepest and most inaccessible, probably as deep as the proton. But it's awesome, isn't it? Yet it's true, Hatha Yoga is that important to the finest-tuned health of the human being.

If you were young when you invented your "new and improved" circuit, it was probably best you didn't waste money patenting it and let somebody else go to the trouble and expense, as candy is really easy to take from babies and it probably would have been stolen from you, depending on what kind of bucks we are talking about it garnering. At least you got to see it in a magazine, though.

Hey, thanks, ClydeCrashKop. A little bit of luck might go a long way.

Reloadron, I'd like to ask you how I should hook the 9v battery to the Easy Pulse 1.1 circuit board. No diagrams or instructions came with it and I am not sure which pins I should connect the battery leads to. Is there any way you could advise me? There are diagrams at this url: https://embedded-lab.com/blog/?p=7336. There are six pins lined up on one corner of the circuit board. One of these is ground, but the ground pin is not connected to any other thing on the circuit board and I am confused about where I need to hook the 9v battery. It seems to me that the ground should go to something on the circuit board but it is just an isolated pin. If you can advise me I'd appreciate it.

Thanks,

Adam

Unless proven otherwise, I would trust that the gnd connection as shown on the schematics is correct. Go ahead and try it. If there truly is no connection to that pad, you can't damage anything. Just make sure the polarity is correct.

I suspect that the pin in question really is connected to ground, but maybe not by a distinct trace.

It's a little hard to tell from just looking at the photo of the top side of the PCB, but from the slight change in coloration near the corners of the PCB, I suspect that the board has a ground plane. This means that there is a layer of grounded copper that covers most of the back side of the board. Component pins that connect to ground would be connected to this plane without 'traces.' They may be connected with a solid connection, or there may be thermal relief connection, that looks like little short spokes.

Thanks for your info, ChrisP58. I synchronously sent my inquiry to the Electro Tech board and the seller of the device, hoping that I could get a cross pollination of answers so that I could be certain about where I am with it, and the seller supplied all the answers I needed. It doesn't always happen that one can get info from a seller after one has bought the goods, and I posted here to cover all bases. The ground connection is real, as you surmised, and the voltage is 5VDC, not 9, as I assumed.