I am presenting briefly here some of the new electronics board that are very useful for science applications.
Linked together with a 3D printer that will open the way to new research.
Don’t hesitate to contact me if you have questions or comments.
Arduino is open source electronic board. These boards are able to read inputs (light sensor, touch button, tenperature sensor) or to generate signals through different output (motors, turning LED on).
It exists several cards depending on the use and the number of inputs/outputs required. Mainly of these cards are use to develop some small robots and are at the core of most of 3D printer systems.
I mainly used 2 different cards the UNO and the 2560 MEGA. These card are similar and very useful for controlling motors (steppers, servos and DC).
Red Pitaya is closed source hardware project intended to be alternative for many expensive laboratory measurement and control instruments.
The card is composed of 2x 125MS/s RF input and 2x 125MS/s RF outputs, with 50MHz analogue bandwidth and 14 bit analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters. Different applications are included within the card like an oscilloscope, spectrum analyser, signal generator, LCR meter and PID controller. It is possible to reprogram the system and develop custom applications.
The Raspberry Pi is a single board computer. This card are useful to develop small autonomous systems. Different version have been developped over time. The latest version (Raspberry Pi 3) incorporate a wifi source and 2 Gb of Ram. Different accessories can be connected to the board in order to increase its use.
In function of your use different OS are possible. I recently started using it and choose to use “Raspbian”. It’s a modified Debian linux that incorporate directly mathematica and python. My aim in with this system is to develop python applications to control my experimental research setup, and completely abolished the use of Labview and more difficult language as C or C++. Python is actually easier to handle and many libraries have been implemented to control devices in the scientific community.