PC sound card-based simple instrument for the potentiometric sensors

Development of a simple and low-cost instrument using a PC sound card for the potentiometric sensors has been reported in this work. It consists of a scanning-DC type data acquisition system which will allow us to acquire an AC signal data corresponding to the scanning-DC signal. Therefore in physical or chemical device characterization it can be used to acquire any DC dependent parameter such as the dielectric constant, capacitance, photocurrent of semiconductor heterostructure, electrochemical parameters, etc. Speaker port of the sound card has been used here to deliver an AC (0 –1 V) that is converted to a corresponding DC voltage externally by a hardware composed of a half-wave precision rectifier (HWPR), a low-pass filter and a level-shifter. The DC voltage can be scanned from +2 to −2 V in any desired steps. The PC sound card Microphone input has been used to collect the AC signal corresponding to the DC voltage steps. For outputting the DC an AC voltage having a frequency of 4000 Hz is sent to the PC sound card Speaker port. The sampling rate for the output voltage is fixed at 8000 sample/s. For collecting the data the configurable sampling rate (>Nyquist rate) depending on the frequency of the input signal has been used. As a test case it has been applied to obtain the AC photocurrent response of a Si3N4/SiO2/Si heterostructure. The experimental results show a good promise for the novel very simple instrument to be used in the potentiometric sensing as well as an important tool for the characterization of physical and chemical devices.