I’ve been wanting to upgrade the storage in ChemHacker central for a while – but I haven’t found a good, sturdy storage unit that is large, can handle holding a lot of weight, and is chemically resistant.
Until now.
I found this old Faygo-labeled shelving unit in a nearby alley:
After a (lot of) cleaning, here it is holding tools and a wide assortment of chemicals in the underground ChemHacker Lab:
As I mentioned earlier, I’m working on programming an arduino interface for the ChemHacker STM.
The arduino currently has to handle the following tasks:
serial control of the five digital potentiometers (amplifier gain control)
serial control of the 24 bit DAC (signal input to the microscope)
analog signal processing from the microscope (via built-in ADC lines)
serial data to the computer of the scanned data (for image processing)
A future task for the arduino may be:
automated control of a stepper motor (for sample approach and control)
My road map for programming is as follows:
establish serial control of the potentiometers
establish serial control of the DAC
establish signal into the ADCs
establish serial data line to computer (and figure out some kind of live image processing system)
interface with microscope circuit(s)
establish stable scanning
As always, things take more time than you think – I foolishly thought I could get steps 1 and 2 done in a few weeks. After nearly a month of struggling, I finally have (1) accomplished, and with some help from some excellent electronic engineers, I’m quickly closing on (2).
Many many thanks to all the people who publish their SPI code on various Arduino boards, without your examples, I never would have gotten this far…
Here’s what I’ve learned from weeks of banging my head into walls: the entire SPI setup must be used for the arduino’s SPI to activate – that includes declaring pins you don’t intend to use (like the MISO and the SLAVESELECT)
