Hi. I'm new to the forum. I'm currently a freshman at Montana State university (38 yr old students rock) and an avid laser enthusiast. I've a very basic understanding of electronics and need to have a microcontroller unit built for a product I sell. I'll lay down the basics of what I'm looking for. You'll forgive me I'm long winded.
I build laser power meters. Up to this point the thermopile has utilized an opamp to increase the signal to a readable 1mv/mw scale that I've been able to attach to a panel meter and display the output of the laser onto the meter.
While this method works wonders, it does not give you the ability to graph the output of a laser unless I hook it to a DMM with usb connectivity. This doesn't provide the ease I'd like to incorporate in my new design.
So, we go with a Microcontroller and display the output with that. Since a panel meter is essentially a microcontroller, I figure this shouldn't be that hard. What would be hard (or so I think) would be making the unit display 5 datapoints onto a graphical onscreen display as well as average power as well as a peak reading. Here's an example of the readout. I've been fiddling with the idea of utilizing OLED display.
Plus, I'd like it to have usb connectivity so that it can save the data to a PC as well as save the information onto a SD card so that it can be directly imported into a PC from that method as well.
Essentially this is just a graphing voltmeter with a few tweaks. I'm willing to pay for the design and programming. From what I hear tell it should be relatively easy. However, having no experience in this stuff yet myself, this is beyond me.
a few other particulars I've come to find out about this project and other things you might need to know.
1. the thermopile is powered from the controller +/- 5-18Vdc
will be powered off a PSU (whatever voltage is needed)
Microcontroller has to be pretty good to see resolution in 1mv
I build laser power meters. Up to this point the thermopile has utilized an opamp to increase the signal to a readable 1mv/mw scale that I've been able to attach to a panel meter and display the output of the laser onto the meter.
While this method works wonders, it does not give you the ability to graph the output of a laser unless I hook it to a DMM with usb connectivity. This doesn't provide the ease I'd like to incorporate in my new design.
So, we go with a Microcontroller and display the output with that. Since a panel meter is essentially a microcontroller, I figure this shouldn't be that hard. What would be hard (or so I think) would be making the unit display 5 datapoints onto a graphical onscreen display as well as average power as well as a peak reading. Here's an example of the readout. I've been fiddling with the idea of utilizing OLED display.
Plus, I'd like it to have usb connectivity so that it can save the data to a PC as well as save the information onto a SD card so that it can be directly imported into a PC from that method as well.
Essentially this is just a graphing voltmeter with a few tweaks. I'm willing to pay for the design and programming. From what I hear tell it should be relatively easy. However, having no experience in this stuff yet myself, this is beyond me.
a few other particulars I've come to find out about this project and other things you might need to know.
1. the thermopile is powered from the controller +/- 5-18Vdc
will be powered off a PSU (whatever voltage is needed)
Microcontroller has to be pretty good to see resolution in 1mv
Last edited: