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The Cosmic Ray Telescope Hardware

The telescope HW is made of a main board that can manage up to four scintillator tiles (two tiles are required for minimum setup). Each tile contains a 10×10 square centimetres 0.6 cm thick scintillator (EJ200), a WLS fiber and a S13360-1350CS SiPM with dedicated amplifier. The main board provides the power supply  for both tile amplifier and  SiPM and includes  the processing logic (analog and digital) for counting measurements. A block diagram of the system is shown below.

The System Block Diagram

In detail each Tile is made of

  • a 10×10 cm 2, 6.4 mm thick scintillator tile;
  • a WLS fibers;
  • s 1.3×1.3 mm2 SiPM
  • a readout circuit with SiPM current sensing

The tile setup and a block diagram of the readout circuit are shown below

The Telescope Tile Setup

The scintillator and the WLS fiber

The Tile Block Diagram

The Main Board is managed by a a Raspberry Pi mini-computer and includes all components for SiPM voltage generation, signal discrimination, trigger generation and counting; a picture of the board is shown below.

In detail is is possible:

  • set four independent SiPM supply voltages
  • set four independent Threshold voltages
  • monitor the SiPM dragged current
  • set the trigger configuration
  • count the trigger events
  • accept an external trigger to increase the area in muon shower detection

Because the system is managed by a Raspberry Pi board it can be controlled by ethernet (wired or wireless) connection then allowing remote operation; moreover because the low power supply requirements  it can be supplied by standard battery pack  then allowing outdoor cosmic ray measurements.

The Telescope Main Board

All the schematics of the system hardware can be downloaded using the following links: