Development of the Data Acquisition System and GUI for QCM Sensor Based System

Abstract

The development of a Quartz crystal Microbalance (QCM) sensor-based data acquisition system (DAS) along with Graphical user interface (GUI) for proper sensing functionality has been described in this work. QCM gas sensor is widely used nowadays for the detection of Volatile Organic compounds (VOC) due to its high sensitivity, linearity and ease of fabrication of VOC specific sensors. The working model of the system comprises of ARM-M4 MK20DX256VLH7 microcontroller or data processing from the QCM sensor and the data acquisition is carried out using a Raspberry Pi 2B. A touchscreen operated GUI has been developed using Python coding language based on Linux kernel operating system with subsequent data storage and analysis. The system is designed to take real time data, and plotting the continuous graph and sensitivity analysis of the sensors. Upon the user’s choice, the measurements are taken for a particular sensor type, when put inside a specific gas environment. The developed system has been tested with a β- cyclodextrin modified QCM sensor for the detection of various concentration of Geraniol and the sensitivity has been plotted in real time with the developed GUI.