Greetings:
I am currently designing a thin film deposition reactor that utilizes multiple solenoid valves that pulse gasses into a vacuum chamber. The way the reactor works is that you have two independent gases that are introduced into the chamber one gas at a time. For clarity lets assume we have two gasses A and B:
- We introduce gas A into the chamber by pulsing on it's solenoid valve (24 V) for exactly 1 second then pulsing off.
- We wait for gas A to do its magic.
- We introduce gas B into the chamber by pulsing on it's solenoid valve (24 V) for exactly 2 seconds then pulsing off.
- We repeat this process by pulsing A then B for X-times
In this simplistic case we only have two gases and two valves, however in my reactor we have multiple valves (8) that each have a different pulse time. To be clear the pulse time is important because I want to time average data over all the pulses for a specific valve. Because the pulse times need to be the same repeatedly I wanted to go a Digital Delay Pulse Generator rout such as this one, http://www.quantumcomposers.com/products/pulse-generator/9600-series where each channel can be programmed for a specific pulse width for a specific valve and externally triggered. This generator is however expensive, ~3K. Can an arduino be programmed as a Digital Delay Pulse Generator for ~8 individual channels?
Thanks.