A commercial embedded board as DAQ in nuclear physics

TL;DR

This paper evaluates a low-cost embedded STM32 board's suitability for gamma spectrometry by testing its data acquisition capabilities with scintillator detectors and analyzing the results with custom Python software.

Contribution

It demonstrates the potential of a commercial embedded STM32 board as an effective and autonomous data acquisition system for nuclear physics gamma spectrometry applications.

Findings

Successfully acquired pulse signals at various frequencies.

Detected Cs137 gamma source responses with the embedded device.

Validated data processing with custom Python software.

Abstract

The aim of this work is to test the capacity of a low cost but powerful device to be used in gamma spectrometry. The IZIRUNF0 [1] is an embedded STM32 board device with an ARM Cortex-M0 microcontroller build in. The possibilities offered by the configuration (direct memory access controller (DMA) acquisition through circular buffer, 12-bit analog to digital converter (ADC), analog watchdog for threshold on ADC, embedded data acquisition, etc.) make it interesting to be used within an autonomous compact particle spectrometry system. Therefore, we have tested it for a pulse like shape (15 {\mu}s wide) at different frequency, as well as the response from a gamma source Cs137 on a CsI(Tl) scintillator coupled to a photodiode detector. The data were offline processed using our PYTHON [2] developed program [3].