MuonPi Lite Board

[hgz]

Due to the long lead times of components used for the HAT board, we developed the MuonPi Lite board, a light-weight simplified board with fewer components featuring only a single readout channel but with otherwise identical basic functionality. some components are foreseen in this version to be provided through generic break-out boards readily available from online vendors. The Kicad design is documented here.

The following list summarizes the major features of the Lite board and differences to the HAT PCBs:

• The Lite board is, unlike the HAT board, connected to the Raspberry Pi through a 40-pin connection cable
• A single input channel for detector signals (HAT has two independent channels)
• No on-the-fly polarity selection of the input channel. Yet, the input polarity (negative or positive signals) can be selected through a solder jumper
• The two hard-to-solder ICs ADS1015/1115 and MCP4728 can optionally be mounted as plug-on breakout board commercially available from e.g. Adafruit
• No software-defined selection of the timing source for the ublox (for timestamping). This feature of the 2-channel HAT board would not make a lot of sense, anyway, since no coincidence signals (XOR, AND) are defined with a single-channel. Still, a selection out of three signal sources (discriminator 100ns, discriminator 1us and time pulse) is provided through a jumper.

We are currently waiting for a pre-series of Lite boards produced and partially mounted at JLCPCB. As soon as the full functionality of this hardware is verified, we will start to switch over to the Lite board as our standard platform to be provided to new users. This step will help to advance more swiftly through the waiting list of detector requests and will hopefully bring down the delivery delay again (from currently one or two years).
More news and detailed information on the Lite board is coming soon.

cheers
hgz

[hgz]

After arrival of the partially assembled pre-series Lite boards after X-mas, I soldered the remaining components to obtain one complete board for testing. Assembly was a piece of cake due to the possibility to simply plug in the ADC and DAC components through the corresponding breakout boards available from online vendors (e.g. https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-mcp ... c-quad-dac and https://www.adafruit.com/product/1085). It turned out, that obviously everything is well designed and working as it should Thanks again to Christian (OE5HCL) for this superb piece of hardware.

The attached photograph shows a lab setup of a detector operated with the first Lite board. The rpi connects to the board with a standard 40-pin (female-female) jumper cable.

Series mounting of the remaining 29 boards of this pre-series batch will start shortly and first detectors featuring the Lite version will be shipped soon.

cheers
hgz