Over the course of the past few weeks, much progress has been made on the Open Source Spectrometer, although the name is still up for debate.
Using TI sample code the following has been made to work:
- The microcontroller running code accepts a buffer of 255 bytes and flips the case of any alphabetic characters received over serial.
- The driver allows a windows application to interface with the hardware over USB2.0
- A demo application, written in C++, now allows the sending of buffers to the microcontroller and receives the processed data back. This is a very fast process, since USB can be thoeretically 480 megabits/s. Currently, we are transferring small buffers, so most of the overhead is in dealing with the individual buffers, but high speed will allow us to easily transfer greater than 4kb buffers many times a second. 4kb is the smallest a buffer could be, since we are using 12 bit ADCS (12 bits per pixel), and we have 2048 pixels.
And Tim Cantwell made a pretty cool visualizer program that displays a spectrum on a grid, which will be able to be added into the interface functionality to show data from the spectrometer once the hardware is more complete. His program is written in C++, using open frameworks and openGL for rendering/GUI.