This update is a bit larger and arguably more important than the last one. There are mainly two pretty large improvements: one on the detector dead time, the other on the display in Geiger mode. Until now it used to show the standard spectrum screen, only that there was in fact no spectrum, but one peak at channel 0. That has finally changed!
Here is a list of changes as always:
- Much faster and more stable interrupts for an improved dead time and less error peaks at the lower ADC bins. I re-evaluated the dead time and it looks like almost 10 µs faster than before in both modes (set averaging 1). That's a huge improvement! As a result of that, the detector also performs much better at higher count rates (>10k cps).
- Pressing the BOOTSEL button on the Raspberry Pi Pico now switches between Geiger and energy measurement modes.
- Geiger mode now has its own little OLED interface with more info about the current counts per second. This could be temporary and there might be a new screen in the future with more features.
- "Read info" command also lists the total number of detector impulses, i.e. the total counts.
All the uf2 files for you to update the device can be found on GitHub right now. If you have any questions, suggestions or issues, feel free to send me a message or create an issue on GitHub.
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Dramatic improvement, NuclearPhoenix!
Still stable at 17000 cps in both modes. Thanks a lot :)
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