Professional Instrumentation for Arduino

Other Hardware Science and Measurement
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Hi, I would like to announce a new project.

The goal could be described as "open science", or at least the part that is about being able to make physical measurements and build experiments when you are not necessarily at an elite institute or holding a large grant to equip your lab.

It is called "The SPI instrumentation project", and here is the link:

The approach is professional grade circuits and sensors and leverage Arduino and Teensy for functionality.

Take a look at what we have so far and see what you think.

The ideas for what to build come from our experience, the basic things we and colleagues have bought for our labs over the years.

We are open to requests and suggestions, though getting to them of course is about time and donations or sponsorships.

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Interesting, but I see no mention of calibration of your devices. Why not, if they are equivalent to elite institution equipment?

1 Like
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Nice pictures, good artwork on the boards. but to me the real crux is in the electronic design and assembly. Without schematics to start with I will not make any more comments if they are equal to professional equipment.

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"I/O products" for analog and digital data in various interface form factors.

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The controller has a precision reference voltage.

And in my experiments i almost always have to do a calibration study anyway regardless of whether i am using a nist certified instrument.

But it is a fair point and thank you for bringing it up. We will probably get to it as the project progresses.

On a broader topic, suggestions are very welcome. I would like to see this become a community project.

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You can see three of the designs here,

We will be adding designs to the github as we progress through the project.

Most of these are things I have built more than a few times for myself and and colleagues, with some minor changes, c.f. connectors, mechanical format, input protection, etc. I still want to actually build and test each of them before I post the designs.

And, I am afraid that I post with the same standards that I use for publishing research, it has to be thoroughly verified before it gets posted, no matter trivial or complex.

Meanwhile, is there a board that you actually want to use? Or is there one you want to sponsor? If you have a real interest of that sort, I am happy to send you a schematic to discuss it.

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Very nice, I am familiar with similar products, I used them for years, for example at the synchrotron we had racks full of boards like that. They tend to be very expensive, some around $8K (the low end for us actually).

That is part of the scenario we are trying to remedy.

I have a good friend and another almost family relation among the older and more established rack mount suppliers. I can tell you the actual cost of the electronics is not anything like $8K or even a reasonable fraction of it.

We hope to be under $200 for everything and much less than that for some things. True, we are not doing 8 or 16 channels x 1MSPS on a single board ($10K), but we can certainly do it in 8 x $100.

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BTW, I want to make class libraries for each of the instrumentation boards.

Help and collaboration is welcome.

There are two libraries for the MCP adcs, within Arduino by other contibutors. They look nice. But for this i think I might need much tighter timing. We run some things right at the limit. You can see what I did for in the S11639-01 code here

And in particular here in the state machine,

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