GnuRadio in particle accelerators

Hi, people. Anyone here has experience using Gnuradio or USRP as an
instrumentation tool (I mean, not for actual radio transmissions)?

After years studying, hobbying and working with SDR, I’ve just learned
that they are very similar to particle acceleator instrumentation, in
a very pleasant way: I was just hired to work on one, precisely
because of the skills acquired with my SDR projects.

Moreover, this particular project (Sirius, in Brasil), has adopted an
open hardware and free software attitude, which makes the use of
Gnuradio particularly interesting.

Has anyone worked with this kind of instruments using Gnuradio? Is
USRP a good tool for this kind of job, or you can think about any
limitation?

Hi Aylons,
I have no answer here. But talking about Gnuradio and nuclear physics I
want to add my idea to your question:
Would it be possible to use Gnuradio in a (home made) Gamma Spectrometer
? These spectrometers usually work with a multichannel analyzer that
measures the pulse height coming from the detector and then sorting the
heights into bins. This is similar to the histogram GUI element found in
GRC, but the counting is accumulative until a timer or manual
interaction stops it. The big difference between SDR use and nuclear
instrumentation is that while SDR mainly works with a constant stream of
data the latter mainly deals with transient pulses.

Mark

Not exactly the same thing, but I recall a physicist presented a paper
at
the first GnuRadio Conference in 2011 on using GR for quantum
communication.

See
http://gnuradio.squarespace.com/grc2011-abstracts#wednesday_1530_1600

Very Respectfully,

Dan CaJacob

On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 02:14:01PM -0200, Aylons H. wrote:

Moreover, this particular project (Sirius, in Brasil), has adopted an
open hardware and free software attitude, which makes the use of
Gnuradio particularly interesting.

That’s a great attitude :slight_smile:

Has anyone worked with this kind of instruments using Gnuradio? Is
USRP a good tool for this kind of job, or you can think about any
limitation?

This depends on what exactly you need to do. But GNU Radio has been used
for many different things in the past, and most likely, it’ll be useful
for you.

I’m always amazed what people have achieved with GNU Radio. Hopefully
you can add another cool application :slight_smile:

Happy hacking,

MB


Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
Communications Engineering Lab (CEL)

Dipl.-Ing. Martin B.
Research Associate

Kaiserstraße 12
Building 05.01
76131 Karlsruhe

Phone: +49 721 608-43790
Fax: +49 721 608-46071
www.cel.kit.edu

KIT – University of the State of Baden-Württemberg and
National Laboratory of the Helmholtz Association

OT but has anyone used GNURadio for music production?

I thought about other options for signal analysis (KST for example). My
initial idea was in absence of a scintillation counter system to use a
(simple) PIN diode like the widely used BPW34 photodiode as detector.
There is some material about this on the web. Then put some amplifier
behind it and do the data acquisition with a DC to HF (direct sample)
modded RTL-SDR dongle. The interesting parameter in this case would be
the pulse height.

2013/10/23 M Dammer [email protected]:

I have no answer here. But talking about Gnuradio and nuclear physics I
want to add my idea to your question:
Would it be possible to use Gnuradio in a (home made) Gamma Spectrometer
? These spectrometers usually work with a multichannel analyzer that
measures the pulse height coming from the detector and then sorting the
heights into bins. This is similar to the histogram GUI element found in
GRC, but the counting is accumulative until a timer or manual
interaction stops it. The big difference between SDR use and nuclear
instrumentation is that while SDR mainly works with a constant stream of
data the latter mainly deals with transient pulses.

Interesting.

But, is GnuRadio needed for it? The pulse height coming from the
detector is a pulsed high-frequency signal, or just a width-modulated
square wave?