Here’s the latest on developing the next-generation (Beta5) ERGO instrument:
The Arduino shield is just about fully checked out. The “physics” part of it that accepts signals from the Geiger counter board works, and there doesn’t seem to be any incompatibility with the Arduino.
We’ve been working on two different GPS solutions that can be part of the shield. One is a plug-in board with a u-blox 6H GPS chip (the board costs $95), and that one works fine. The other solution is a GPS module that is soldered directly to the shield board, and I finally have that working, too, though some details of antenna connections need to be worked out. It looks like we can make an Arduino shield for less than $50 in parts that plugs onto a $50 Arduino Ethernet microcontroller to make a complete ERGO timestamping system. The only thing to add is some kind of Geiger-counter board.
The next challenge is to develop software for the Arduino to process the data from the GPS and upload the event timestamps to our data server.
The Arduino shield is just about fully checked out. The “physics” part of it that accepts signals from the Geiger counter board works, and there doesn’t seem to be any incompatibility with the Arduino.
We’ve been working on two different GPS solutions that can be part of the shield. One is a plug-in board with a u-blox 6H GPS chip (the board costs $95), and that one works fine. The other solution is a GPS module that is soldered directly to the shield board, and I finally have that working, too, though some details of antenna connections need to be worked out. It looks like we can make an Arduino shield for less than $50 in parts that plugs onto a $50 Arduino Ethernet microcontroller to make a complete ERGO timestamping system. The only thing to add is some kind of Geiger-counter board.
The next challenge is to develop software for the Arduino to process the data from the GPS and upload the event timestamps to our data server.