A modular and flexible data acquisition system for a cosmic rays detector network

TL;DR

This paper presents a modular, internet-controlled data acquisition system for cosmic ray detectors, featuring flexible hardware, precise timing, environmental sensors, and scalable server infrastructure for data management and analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a novel modular hardware design with flexible configurations, integrated GPS timing, and a containerized server framework for cosmic ray detection networks.

Findings

Successful deployment of a flexible detector station prototype

Accurate event timing using GPS and TDC

Efficient data handling with MQTT and containerized servers

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a modular data acquisition system developed as the foundation of a cosmic ray detector network. Each detector setup (henceforth referred as a station) is composed of an independent hardware device that can be controlled and read-out through the Internet. This device is designed to acquire and process the signal of up to eight different detector planes. Each of these detector planes uses plastic scintillator slabs that are optically coupled to silicon photomultipliers (SiPM). Within a single station, different geometries and plane orientations are possible using the same baseline design. The main readout is based on a programmable system-on-a-chip (PSoC), a flexible and re-configurable commodity hardware that is used to implement the trigger and timing logic. A Time to Digital Converter (TDC) is used to determine the precise timing of the event relative to a GPS timing signal and to estimate the signal amplitude through the Time-over-Threshold (ToT) method. An auxiliary set of sensors provide environmental information and station detector planes orientation that, together with other operation data, are periodically sent to a server using the MQTT protocol. Data is cached using an in-memory database for online monitoring and further persisted into a SQL database for offline analysis. The server framework is based in software application containers allowing easy replication of the server infrastructure.