A common theme in The Hackaday Prize and Hackaday.io in general is tools to make more tools. There are a lot of people out there trying to make the next Bus Pirate, and simply measuring things is the first step towards automating a house or creating the next great blinkey invention.
In what is probably the most capable measurement system in the running for this year’s Hackaday Prize, [jithin] is working on a Python Powered Scientific Instrumentation Tool. It’s a microcontroller-powered box containing just about every imaginable benchtop electronics tool, from constant current supplies, LCR meters, waveform generators, frequency counters, and a logic analyzer.
This project is stuffed to the gills with just about every electronic tool imaginable; there are programmable gain amplifiers, voltage references, DACs and constant current sources, opamps and comparators, all connected to a bunch of banana jacks. All of these components are tied up in a nifty Python framework, allowing a bunch of measurements to be taken by a single box.
If that’s not enough, [jithin] is also working on wireless extension nodes for this box to get data from multiple acquisition points where wires would be unfeasible. This feature uses a NRF24L01+ radio module; it’s more than enough bandwidth for a lot of sensors, and there’s enough space all the wireless sensors you would ever need.
