ADAPTIVE 60 HZ NOISE CANCELLER

ABSTRACT
An active noise canceler to eliminate the 60 Hz noise found in electrical signals due to AC power-line
contamination.60 Hz noise is frustrating for anyone trying to make sensitive measurements of low
voltage processes (eg. Electrocardiogram measurements), record audio from electrical instruments
(eg. guitar "hum"), or use electronic systems near an AC transformer. The most common way to
eliminate the noise is through a 60 Hz notch filter. Because there are inherent variations in the 60 Hz
signal, a notch filter is not robust against signal source frequency changes. However, using a
microcontroller such as the ATMega32 to monitor a reference signal and output an out-of-phase
signal to cancel the noise, we overcome the limitations of a single-frequency selective notch filter
and can achieve at least 15 dB cancellation of 60 Hz component in the contaminated signal. Digital
Signal Processors (DSPs) or Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) can be programmed for this
purpose, but are substantially more expensive than the ATMega32.

METHEDOLOGY
Hardware Implemation
The final hardware selection ended up being a small subsection of all the hardware we built. The
additional hardware section has links to all circuit schematics we made and gives reasons we did not
use them.The hardware we did use is detailed here. It included two operational amplifier adder
stages (to generate the noise and clean signal), an AC transformer stage (to get a reference signal),
and a simple RC filter (to convert the pulse width modulated signal to a sinusoidal signal).

Software Implementation
We implemented a microcontroller-based, fixed-point adaptive Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filter,
so we compute output by summing the product of weights and previous inputs:To avoid an
undesired high-frequency harmonic, we output our signal pulse width modulated at the maximum
rate supported by the ATMega32: 62,500 Hz. We do this through an interrupt, which linearly
interpolates between desired outputs, determined every 128 outputs. Since the sample rate and the
output rate are related by a power of two, we can find an appropriate increment for the
interpolation with a simple right shift.