Poly Potential Portable Potentiostat
Edit: This research has now been published in the ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology.
Please view the publication here and the public repository here.
Various research activities related to profiling chemicals employ detection or measurement of a specimen’s response to electric fields or currents. A poly-potential device (also called a potentiostat) that is portable, forms one of the basic measuring equipment essential to these domains.
I worked on PPPP as my undergraduate design-oriented-project as part of the MNNE group.
The aim was to propose a completely indepedent, portable system that is able to analyse solutions based on their electrochemical response through powerful data acquisition hardware and flexible software post-processing. While an economical device obviously cannot rival the quality and capabilities of research-grade potentiostats, we wanted only limited functionlity with this device, especially the ones needed only for environmental or public health applications. The hardware used in the design is widely available. One of the stars in the design was Texas Instruments’ LMP91000 (AFE)
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It wouldn’t be wrong to say that the project aimed at extracting whatever features the LMP91000 could provide for our limited use-case. Since Texas Instruments does not support interfacing their products with AVR microcontrollers, it was a challenging task to get everything up and running.
For interfacing the sensor, Orlando Hoilett’s work at LinnesLab proved very helpful. However, since our implementation focused more on specificities of the electrochemical analysis and post-processing, rather than using all configurations available in the AFE, we wrote customised APIs to interface the LMP91000.