Team:Queens Canada/Luminometer Software
Luminometer Software
Electrical Design
The light to frequency sensor used as a luminometer was attached to a digital input on the microcontroller. When the sensor detects a photon, it sends a pulse of high voltage to the digital input which is then detected by the controller. To properly count each photon, an interrupt was attached to this digital input in the software, such that any time the controller received a pulse of high voltage, the rest of the program was interrupted, and the photon count was increased. By allowing the program to run for a set amount of time, a rate can be calculated for the number of photons per second. By increasing the length of this sampling period, lower levels of light can be more accurately measured and compared.