Spectrometer board set

[DrM]

This a two board solution for a CCD spectrometer. The mother board hosts a Teensy 4.0 with a differential receiver and 16-bit ADC. There is a daughter card for each of the supported Linear CCDs (Toshiba, Sony, Hamamatsu) with an analog section and logic conversion for that specific sensor. The auxiliary port (dual row, 0.5inch pitch) provides additional analog and digital i/o interfaces.

The analog circuit for the CCD overall provides shift, invert and gain to match the sensor output from dark to saturation to the input range of the 16-bit ADC while accommodating certain part variances. Some further care in designing the PCB helps realize electrical noise performance at close to its theoretical limit of about 5uV for a 1MHz readout,

Shutter speeds are from 10 usec to seconds, and maximum frame rate is about 130 fps. The firmware provides clocked, triggered, and gated (open and close the shutter) operations and provides a sync output with offset and a busy signal at the auxiliary port.

The host interface is ASCII commands and responses with data transfer in binary or formatted. For the host side there is a python program that provides a graphical and cli user interface when invoked as "main", and as an import, provides a class library.

The Teensy 4 is an important enabler for this because of the hi-speed USB and the faster processor.