Raspberry Pi 4 on Cosmic Physics Project - MuonPi Detector

 

The core of the muon detector consists of a Raspberry Pi mini-computer combined with a u-blox NEO-M8 GNSS module. They are coupled to a plastic scintillator, which acts as the active sensor material, and SiPMs for light detection.

The software is designed to be user-friendly. It takes care of synchronizing the accumulated data with a central server, requiring minimal effort from the user. Nonetheless, a graphical user interface allows to precisely control and debug the muon detector if desired.

The Hardware

SiPM PCB

The SiPM photosensor which detects the dim light generated inside the scintillation detector is mounted on a small SiPM board. Different numbers of SiPMs and read-out configurations can be realized through its flexible design.

Preamplifier

The preamplifier is located in close vicinity to the SiPM photodetector board and amplifies the weak signals for transmission to the MuonPi board, where they are further processed and evaluated.

The MuonPi-Board

The main signal processing, voltage generation, and parameter monitoring and adjustment is done on the Raspberry Pi plug-on MuonPi Board.

MuonPi Setup

(Requirements: a MuonPi board plugged onto the GPIO connector of the RPi)

• First, add the MuonPi apt repository to your system:

wget -qO - https://archive.muonpi.org/muondetector.public.key | sudo apt-key add - 

sudo sh -c "echo deb https://archive.muonpi.org/raspbian buster main > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/muondetector.list"

• Update the repositories:

sudo apt update

• Install the muondetector-daemon package and it's dependencies:

sudo apt install muondetector-daemon

• Optional: install the Graphical User Interface (GUI) program to monitor and control the MuonPi locally

sudo apt install muondetector-gui

• For more look at here https://muonpi.org/