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Topic: Pasco Radiation Detectors (Read 4546 times)
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Vernier Forum Admin
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Full Member
Posts: 108
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Posted on: 2001-11-27 07:47:12 by Jim Guillemette
If you have an older Pasco LabNet, Geiger/Mueller tube (SE-7981/7985) setup this post might be of interest to you. While browsing the Vernier site for probe compatibility I read that these LabNet detectors could be used with a LabPro interface if you used two adapters.
One adapter was a Vernier DG-BTD and the other was a Pasco CI-6622. I could not find a description of this adapter on Pasco' s web site or the in latest Pasco catalog, but I think it must connect a RJ11 jack (the kind on the end of the Pasco detectors) to a 1/4" stereo jack (the kind that plugs into the DG-BTG).
Anyway. Since I didn't want to wait and order an adapter I thought I might hard wire a 1/4" stereo plug to the LabNet detectors. The LabNet detectors that I have were designed to plug into a 15 pin game port on the back of a IBM/clone pc. Only three of the pins, (pin 1, pin 4, and pin 14) are used. I found a pinout diagram on the web for a typical gameport card and it showed that pin 1 corresponds to +5 volts, pin 4 is ground, and pin 14 is for joystick input. If you look at the RJ11 plug on the LabNet detectors it is easy to see that the red wire (pin D?) gets connected to pin 1 (+5 volts) on the game card, the black wire (pin E?) gets connected to pin 4 (ground), and the blue wire (pin A?) gets connected to pin 14. This looked enough like the pinout diagram for a 1/4" plug on theVernier site so I went ahead and cut off the RJ11 jack from the detector.
I then soldered the red wire to the tip if a 1/4" stereo plug, the black wire to the shield, and the blue wire to the center section of the plug. When I tested the detector with a LabPro interface and a DG-BTG adapter everything seemed to work fine. (No smoke or melted wires, etc.) I tried one of the Logger Pro 2.1.1 experiments (Nuclear Radiation with Computers, Experiment 03) and I found the half-life of Ba137m to within 5% of the accepted value. I wired one of the Apple II versions of the LabNet detectors (SE-7981) the same way and it worked too.
What I would like to do is just attach a British Telecom connector (left hand) to the detector since I won't be using it with anything but a LabPro interface. Does anyone know where you can get BT connectors and a crimping tool?
Jim Guillemette
Winthrop High School
Winthrop, Maine 04364
jguil@winthrop-hs.winthrop.k12.me.us
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