Marionette Data Acquisition (DAQ) System

Overview

Marionette is an open hardware, firmware, and software project to bring expensive DAQ system features to the masses. It’s 2015, so instead of some complicated weird FPGA or whatever, we can throw a regular old microcontroller at this problem and get “good enough” features. Features like:

Also, we wanted this to be heavily Python based, because we all use Python for prototyping because Python.

Oh, and, rockets: we desperately need this for our work on open source rockets. Although the more we think about this, the more we really, really want this for our work at our various engineering companies.

Finally, the name is K’s fault. Who would name an awesome open project after creepy puppets?!

Marionette being demo'd at a PSU Capstone Poster presentation Marionette DAQ layout (top layer)

Why

We’ve all used things like Labjacks and Arduinos for all of our DAQ before, and frankly, they’re terrible. Arduinios are fast but slow and useless as soon as anything gets complicated, and Labjacks are spendy for good performance and despite being the industry standard and having an open API, they’re just… weird. Their API is hard to understand and use, and there are weird drivers, and parts are open and other parts aren’t… etc etc.

We wanted something reliable and fully open. That can do sophisticated things.

Specifications

These are totally wrong, but here’s what we started with:

What How Much
3.3V GPIO 60
12 bit 1Msps ADC 15
12 bit DAC 5
I2C interface 2
CAN 2.0B interface 1
SPI interface 1
SD Card 1

History