GeigerDAQ

Authors: Areg Hovhannisyan ([email protected] ), Areg Danagoulian ([email protected])

License and Copyright: see individual files

This is a suite of various codes necessary for reading out the TTL signal from a typical Geiger-Muller detector by an Arduino microprocessor.
The suite consists of two types of codes:

• Arduino codes for detecting the TTL pulse, and transfering the timestamp of the pulse to the computer over the serial protocol
• Python codes for reading in the serial data from the Arduino
• readout from the microphone signal
• code for ROOT, for reading in data and analyzing its time distribution

More specific information:

• requirements.txt -- Requirements for running the Python scripts
• requirements_rpi.txt -- Requirements for running the logger_GPIO.py file (on a Raspberry Pi)
• logger.py -- reads data from the serial bus, performs analysis, writes to a file
• logger_barebone.py -- does the bare minimum of the above
• logger_println.py -- the older (less efficient but simpler) version of logger.py. Will be retired in the near future.
• plotter.py -- simply python script for plotting the results (requires only one column)
• waiting_time.C -- the C++ code for ROOT, that does an analysis similar to plotter.py
• logger_GPIO.py -- the python code for reading in the signal using the GPIO of a Raspberry Pi
• read_mike_trigger.py -- a completely different approach, which instead of arduino instead has the TTL sent to the audio-jack of the laptop, with pyaudio reading the voltage on the microphone connector

Arduino codes

There are two sets of software for running the Arduino microcontroller.

• GeigerCounter/GeigerCounter.ino -- this is the older code that uses a 16x2 (large, clunky) LCD, in a configuration that is similar to the photo above. Deprecated, will be removed in future versions.
• GeigerCounter_oled/GeigerCounter_oled.ino -- this is the newer code that operates a 128x64 OLED screen. A lot of buggs have been fixed and the code has been simplified. It displays the battery voltage, the HV voltage (in real time -- allowing to tune it via the 50 Ohm pot), as well as the CPM and the dose rate. We strongly recommend this version over the older GeigerCounter.ino.

Testing:

The code here has been tested with two platforms:

• Arduino Pro Micro
• Arduino Nano Every

Documentation:

The usage of GeigerCounter.ino and logger_barebone.py can be found in the Documentation directory. To run the latex (in Mac OS X) do

pdflatex -shell-escape Documentation.tex