A Modular Datalogger and Slow-Control Platform for Physics Experiments with Time-Series Telemetry and Web Dashboards

TL;DR

This paper introduces a modular slow-control system for physics experiments that integrates hardware and software for precise environmental monitoring, with real-time data visualization via web dashboards.

Contribution

It presents a novel modular hardware architecture and software integration for continuous, accurate environmental monitoring in nuclear physics experiments.

Findings

High metrological uniformity across channels

Range and accuracy suitable for nuclear physics environments

Real-time data visualization with web dashboards

Abstract

We present a NIM 2U slow-control system designed for continuous monitoring of environmental and facility parameters during data taking in nuclear physics experiments. The architecture integrates a base controller board with eight channels for PT100/PT1000 probes and up to three plug-in extension boards, each providing SMA connections on the front panel. All boards adopt a 16-bit SAR ADC with an external 2.5 V reference, yielding an LSB of 38.15 uV and ensuring metrological uniformity across heterogeneous channel types. The operating range for PT100/PT1000 probes spans -200 degrees Celsius to 300 degrees Celsius, with a design accuracy at the 1 percent level. The system includes modules dedicated to standard industrial signals 4--20 mA and 0--10 V and a module for current measurement in the 500 nA--100 uA range with automatic gain range selection. The software chain publishes time series to Graphite and provides visualization through Grafana over Ethernet. A complete quantitative characterization of stability and accuracy is ongoing and will be reported in a subsequent work.