Close

Operating the PB7220 with an SBC

A project log for The THz Drone Project

I am working on a project to fly a THz Spectrometer on a drone. This will enable spot measurements of important atmospheric molecules.

joseph-demersJoseph Demers 05/25/2016 at 18:300 Comments

In order to make sure that a single board computer (SBC) would have the power to operate the PB7220 I assembled the Advantec PCM-3362 with the 40G SSD drive, and attached both to an external power supply. I have had these components for around 5 years, so I was concerned that they wouldn't be up to the task. Data acquisition can be slow if the computer is not powerful enough and this in turn makes taking the spectra slower. I then installed Windows 10, the USB drivers and .NET and had the SBC booting up fine. Next was the compiled Visual Basic code that operated the PB7220. This went smoothly and I found that the little Intel Atom did a remarkably good job at operating the software at speed. After using the SBC to operate the spectrometer and measuring some water vapor lines (shown in pictures) I then went about figuring out how to mount it to the existing systems with as little modification as possible and without the need to make new parts. I decided to attach them to the lid of the spectrometer along with the THz optics rail.

Discussions