Data acquisition software

[Steven Haid]

While building a fusor I am developing software to capture data from the fusor and record, display, and graph the data. The goal is to display the image from the camera, HV voltage and current, chamber pressure, and neutron counts per minute. The software displays, graphs and records the data. The software, and description of the hardware I am using is available at https://github.com/sthaid/proj_fusor. See the REDME and NOTES files. The copyright says anyone can do whatever they want with this software and that the author has no liability.

I have just added the capability to digitize the Amp Out signal from a Ludlum 2929 Scaler. The configuration is:
He3Tube ---- Ludlum 2929 Scaler ---- Resistor ---- ADC ----- RaspberryPi3
Where the ADC is Measurement Computing USB-204 with 500K samples/sec max capture rate.
The Resistor is 25k ohm and in series. It reduces the voltage from the Ludlum scaler and widens the pulse.

The software scans the 500,000 samples per second for pulses,
- locates the pulse
- determines the pulse height
- based on pulse height the pulse is assigned a channel
- the channel count is incremented
- moving average is computed for each channel over various averaging durations

If you do want to try this I suggest starting with the program in the mccdaq_test directory, which focuses on analyzing the Amp Out from the scaler.

I have compared the digitized values with the pulse captured on a storage oscilloscope and the digitized pulse values seem correct.

Other notes:
1- the Ludlum 2929 has an Amp Out connector on the rear. Other Ludlum scalers do not have an Amp Out connector.
2- Instead of using the Ludlum I had considered using a Cremat Preamp CR-Z-110-HV, but decided against this
because the Ludlum includes everything that I need in one package. The voltage output from the Cremat is pretty low
and would probably need an additional amplifier before connecting to the ADC.