A low cost and simple fluxgate magnetometer implementation

Abstract

Having wide application area and high performance, Fluxgate magnetometers are popular devices to measure low frequency AC and DC magnetic field vectors. In this work, we designed a simple and a low cost magnetometer prototype to obtain natural earth magnetic field value between ± 0.6 Gauss (G). Using basic microprocessors and a phase detection code technique, unlike conventionally lock-in amplifier, we drove the sensor by excitation signal whose frequency is 1.086 kHz and magnitude is 31 mA. Eventually, the direction and the magnitude of DC magnetic field is successfully determined with the implemented fluxgate magnetometer prototype.