Dan Steingart

The Ardustat is my (in progress) open source successor to Jonny Galvo. It uses a standard USB-Arduino unit with a custom designed daughterboard to provide:

• A galvanostat with a current range from .1 microA to 10 mA
• A potentiostat with a potential range from 0 to 5V with 5 mV resolution.

The Ardustat is a two electrode system for the time being, primarily for characterizing capacity and power delivery of small batteries, supercapacitors, and DC energy harvesting devices such as photovoltaics and thermoelectrics.

These features are provided from a single USB port on a testing computer. A java based GUI (again, open sourced, written with Netbeans) allows complete control of the ardustat unit, and a custom scripting language, JonnyScript (based on DUALFOIL convention) allows multiple potentiostat and galvanostat commands to be strung together. This lets the ardustat cycle batteries or capacitors for weeks on end with complex charging/loading parameters.

Each Ardustat costs ~$60 in parts and involves minimal, simple soldering (no surface mount parts, etc). The software runs on just about any modern platform (tested on Windows XP, 2000, Mac OS X, Ubuntu Linux, Fedora Linux).

Find out more at http://steingart.ccny.cuny.edu/ardustat