New Teensy 3.0

[Jerry]

A guy I know in the local Dorkbot group makes the popular Teensy microcontroller boards I use in a lot of my projects.

He has come out with a new one, the Teensy 3.0. This one uses a Arm Cortex M4 running at 48mhz (Overclockable to 96) and had a lot of neat specs like 13bit usable A to D's.

It also has a I2S which might be a way to get data from a scintillation sensor in and do gamma spectroscopy with. It should have the hp to crunch pretty good since it has the DSP stuff too.

Best of all it is really cheap. The bootloader allows it to be easily programmed in C or Arduino.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pau ... -arduino-a

[Doug Coulter]

I'll have to check it out. The real issue with making an MCA out of a uP is the peak catcher and pileup avoider in the front end. 13 bits is more a/d rez than you need, for all but HPGE, NaI, even a good one, has broader lines than that, and when I borrowed a 12 bit MCA, the detector, any of my many NaI heads (including the huge "gallon jug" ones, were the limit, not the bit rez.
No real DSP is actually needed - you just increment some bin in a histogram whenever you get a peak that high. If the count rate gets too high, you can just ignore some of them as long as you do it "fairly" which is pretty easy to accomplish, since radiation/decay is the most uniformly random thing known to man. Just catch the ones you can, and don't look for more while the a/d is busy.

Edit: I2C is usually not a lot of fun to program if you do error recovery correctly, and is almost always a lot slower than the built in a/d on any uP I've worked with.