I've run into a little problem with my senior design project, and have a couple of electronics questions I need to run by you guys. I'm a mechanical engineer, not an electrical, so while my understanding of the basics of EE is fine, my knowledge of the finer points of analog electronics is a little lacking.

Basically, I have a vacuum switch that outputs a square wave, when I thought it was going to be a step output. I was hoping that, rather than completely rethinking my vacuum sensing solution, I could take the absolute value of the square wave, and essentially get a slightly noisy step.
Do you guys know of any circuit that could perform this function (op-amp or otherwise)?

I understand this sounds stupid, and that I should just go back to square one, but I'll just throw this out there.

Will a simple rectifier work? I don't know if I entirely get what you need but if all you need is the absolute value of a wave then a rectifier should give it to you.

Thanks, I'll look into that.