Upgrading Legacy Lab Equipment
Background: A prominent university materials science laboratory possessed a highly accurate, yet outdated spectrometer. While mechanically and optically sound, its control interface was restricted to a legacy DOS-based system, requiring manual data extraction via floppy disks.
Our Solution: Our engineering team developed a custom bridging PCB utilizing an ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller. This board intercepted the proprietary serial signals from the spectrometer’s internal ADCs, converted the data in real-time, and transmitted it via a modern TCP/IP interface.
Results: Data acquisition efficiency improved by 300%. Researchers can now trigger scans remotely and pipe the data directly into Python and MATLAB for automated analysis.
