An autonomous programmable system for Mössbauer spectroscopy, accessed by a PC program

Abstract

A low cost, stand alone microprocessed equipment for data acquisition and driver control, designed under the requirements of Mössbauer spectroscopy is described. It has a functional mode as pulse analyzer (PHA) and a second mode as a multichannel analyzer (MCA) while it generates waveforms -- triangular, sawtooth and sinusoidal -- between 2 and 40 Hz, buffered up to a capacity of 750 mA for velocity transducer (DRIVER) management, with PID signal synthesizer and error minimization circuits. Its resolution is variable, between 2 and 1024 channels. The system has CMOS technology of integration, Z-80--74HC, with a 4.9152 MHz crystal time based; its dead time is of 0.61 μs and its minimum dwell time is of 32 μs. Data are continuously kept in memory and can be transferred, under a managing program request, via RS-232c protocol at 9600 BAUD -- to a PC computer for its analysis and display. The program written for a PC is able to distinguish up to 8 different spectrometers by means of an identity number assigned to each unit. Therefore, the serial input may be multiplexed in order to attend all the systems, that can work simultaneously.