The new data acquisition system of the LAGO Collaboration based on the Redpitaya board

Abstract

The present work describes the results obtained in the development of the new Data Acquisition System (DAQ) that will be used by the Latin American Giant Observatory (LAGO) Collaboration. According to the requirements of the Water Cherenkov Detectors (WCD) used in LAGO, the new system must be capable of recording fast pulses (∼ns) from a photomultiplier (PMT), control the high voltage level applied to it, in addition to monitoring the atmospheric conditions in which the data were taken. Some figures of merit are shown, indicating the performance of the new system working with a WCD. The DAQ is based on a commercial board plus a custom-made interface board. This implementation includes scalers, sub-scalers, an automatic baseline correction algorithm, pressure & temperature sensing, geolocalization, an external trigger and the capability to set and monitor the high voltage applied to the PMT. The flexibility in the design of the system allows to adapt it to different particle detector technologies, such as silicon photomultipliers, resistive plate chambers and scintillators. Preliminary results prove the validity, reliability and high performance of the system.