Making
People empowered to change their immediate surroundings can change the world. Making is about more than building, or tinkering, or assembling. It is about improving your surroundings through investigation, creativity, and hard work. There are no prerequisites, no foundational knowledge required, simply a desire to learn and a willingness to work.
Arduino
The arduino project is a shining example of success in open source hardware and the maker community. Originally designed to enable artists to leverage the power of programmable microcontrollers, the arduino board has become a symbol of electronics making and has rekindled the home hobby electronics scene.
Arduino UNO
The current standard board from Arduino. Useful for most projects, and a great gateway to the world of Ardunio. Most of our projects start on this board and then either port up to a Mega or down to a Nano/Micro or some other compatible variant.
Temperature and Relative Humidity monitor
Using an ethernet shield and the Plotly streaming API, we can monitor the temperature and humidity of our research lab.
Servo shutter
A computer-controlled beam blocking shutter used to turn our signal beam on and off between calibration sets. An additional feature of this project is the ability to power down the servo remotely to eliminate any mechanical vibrations during our sensitive optical data collection phase.
LCD menu driver for RF signal generator
We use an Arduino to display the status and settings for a home-build RF signal generator. This box creates the 1 Watt signal used to power up to three acousto-optic modulators (AOM). These AOMs are phase locked to provide up to three coherent fields that can be independently pulsed on and off as part of our stored light experiments.