Establishing standards

[Tinkerer]

As members of this forum, we have some common goals:

Learn about the works inside the box of the metal detectors.

Repair or build a metal detector.

It would be useful if we could establish some standards within this hobby world. It seems to be an impossible task, due to the great variety of detector technology, but, even if we can not establish a fully standardized system, it would help if we could establish at least some standard guidelines.

Within these guidelines, we could, for example, set a board size, interconnect parameters, maybe an audio? Power supply?

Could we get some ideas discussed? Suggestions?

Tinkerer

[Carl-NC]

I once started a modular PI design. I may have posted the beginnings of it on this forum, don't recall and it's been a long time ago. Anyway, I was trying to create a power module standard, a transmitter standard, audio standard, etc and design a backplane that would carry all the needed powers & signals. The hope was that I could recycle large chunks of circuitry between varying designs. I didn't get very far before realizing that it was a futile effort. First, there are no standards between designs. A pinpointer, a diver PI, and a meteorite hunter have radically different needs, as does monopolar pulsing and bipolar pulsing, as does a mono coil and an autotransformer coil, as does a single channel demod and four channels of demod. And the backplane was becoming unwieldy with gobs of power lines, small analog signals, and big pulses running around. I abandoned the whole idea.