Today I tested the circuitry within the QPD to make sure I had put it back together correctly. The output was able to detect when a laser pointer was shone on different quadrants of the QPD when hooked up to the oscilloscope, so fixing the QPD worked!
Following this, I spent awhile understanding what was going on with the circuit reading from the QPD. I concluded that the opamp on the QPD circuit acted as a low pass filter, with corner frequency of about 17 kHz, which serves our purposes (we are only interested in frequencies below 1 kHz). I diagrammed the circuit that I plan to build to give pitch and yaw (attached). It will be necessary to make small modifications to the circuitry already built (removing some resistors), which I have started on.
Next time, I will construct the circuit that adds/subtracts signals on a breadboard and test it with the QPD circuit that is already built. |