Equipment

Electrical

We are, surprisingly enough, the only general access EE lab on campus, and have some pretty good equipment (including some of the nicest bench supplies on campus!):

  • TDK Lambda Genesys Supplies: High-performance adjustable switching power supplies. We have three GEN50-30 (50V, 30A), one GEN80-42 (80V, 42A) and one GEN300-17 (300V, 17A).
  • Sorensen XT 30-2: 30V, 2A linear benchtop supplies with fast transient response (100us) and guaranteed no over/undershoot during power cycling.
  • Xantrex XHR40-25M: 40V, 25A switching benchtop supply. Two available.
  • Dynaload 100-120-800: 100V, 120A, 800W adjustable electronic load. Can simulate constant current, constant voltage, constant power, or constant resistance loads.
  • Rigol DS1104Z: 100MHz, 1GSa/s 4-channel digital oscilloscopes. Two available.
  • Rigol MSO5354: 350MHz, 8GSa/s 4-channel digital oscilloscope with 20MHz 5Vpp arbitrary waveform generator.
  • HP 3312A: 10MHz function generator.
  • Yokogawa DL708E: 8-channel, 12-bit, 10MHz isolated oscilloscope. Useful for power measurements, measurements on line powered projects, or where low noise is required (the noise floor is significantly lower than on an 8-bit oscilloscope).
  • Fluke Scopemeter 199: portable 200MHz, 2.5GSa/s oscilloscope. Like the Yokogawa, it is also isolated, but has far worse resolution and fewer channels (ours only has one, since channel B is dead).
  • Metcal SP-200's: Strange and wonderful inductively heated soldering irons, probably the best irons on the market for small to medium (up to 10-gauge wire) work.
  • Aoyue Int 866: Preheated surface mount rework station. Makes soldering SMD boards in general much easier, and makes reliably hand soldering fine-pitch packages such as TSSOP's possible.

Mechanical

MITERS's decentralized structure makes it much easier for users to access our machine tools, since we can do frequent one-on-one trainings and give specialized advice. Our equipment consists of:

  • Bridgeport Vertical Knee Mills: Standard vertical milling machines. We have one Bridgeport-branded one and one Victor-branded clone, both with DRO's.
  • Hardinge HLV Lathe: 11x18" manual lathe, one of the finest ever made. The largest chuck we have is 6"; we have 3-jaw, 4-jaw, and collet chucks.
  • Clausing 6918 Lathe: 14x48" manual lathe. We have 3-jaw, 4-jaw, and collet chucks.
  • Dyna Myte 1007 CNC Mill: 10x7" CNC mill. Ours is converted to run Linux CNC – a huge improvement from the MS-DOS system it shipped with.
  • Vertical and Horizontal Bandsaws: Standard metal-cutting bandsaws (they also do wood). The vertical is a Grob NS18, the horizontal is a Wells 5M.
  • Tooling: We have a fairly complete library of tooling, including the usual mill and lathe tools (end mills, edge finders, countersinks, boring heads, drill chucks and bits, fly cutters, turning, and parting). In addition, most of the Clausing tooling and some of the Hardinge tooling consist of indexable carbide tools, and we keep a number of solid carbide end mills around for the CNC and Bridgeports.
  • Hand Tools: Dewalt brushless cordless drills, Dremels, and a variety of pneumatic tools, including a die grinder and impact wrench. We also have files, saws, screwdrivers, hammers, clamps, locking pliers, and a variety of other small tools.

Rapid Prototyping

We have a number of 3D printers and other prototyping tools:

  • Zortrax M200 3D Printer: We have this printer as part of the campus-wide makerspace program. Prints ABS, PLA, PC-ABS, and HIPS at reasonable quality, and is free to use since it takes commodity filaments.
  • UP! Plus 3D Printer: Small ABS-only 3D printer. The small size actually makes it more reliable (there are fewer issues with bed leveling and part warp). Also takes commodity filament and is free to use.
  • Stratasys uPrint: Professional-grade FDM printer – a combination of Stratasys filaments, patents, and tuning means it can reliably print huge flat parts (which most FDM printers cannot do because of part warping). Somewhat expensive to operate; contact a keyholder if you think you need to use this particular printer.
  • PCB Prototyping: We don't recommend making your own boards, now that Chinese fabs will do prototypes for $30 shipped and have a 1-week turnaround time from ordering to delivery. However, if you want to make something simple, such as a breakout, we have a generic "CNC 3020" router for routed boards

Computing

MITERS doesn’t provide any turnkey services (that would fall under the duties of SIPB), but we do have high-performance systems that users can run extended jobs on, something that is not available as a general resource anywhere else on campus. The nature of computing means the hardware changes quickly; it currently consists of:

  • High Memory System: Quad Xeon E5-4650 processors (total 32 cores/64 threads), 256GB of RAM, GTX 1070, and a high-performance SSD RAID. Runs Windows Server 2012 or Linux.
  • Virtualization Cluster: 4-node XCP-NG (Xen) virtualization cluster. Each node has 2x X5650 processors (total 12 cores/24 threads) and 48GB of memory. The cluster is backed by several TB of storage over 10Gb Ethernet.
  • Workstations: We have two general-purpose workstations – an i7-4930K (6 cores/12 threads, 4.2GHz)/16GB/Quadro 4000 system and a highly overclocked Pentium G4400 (2 cores/2 threads, 4.4GHz)/8GB/Quadro 4000 system for single-threaded applications.

In general, the Xen cluster is recommended for general-purpose Linux work over SSH; the hi-mem system is set up for local use and is not recommended for remote access (there are no guarantees your job will not be killed by a local user). The workstations should never have unattended jobs running on them.

Imaging

The group doesn’t own any cameras (they are too fragile and theft-prone), but some of its members do, and are generally willing to allow them to be used for interesting research or projects.

  • Photron Fastcam Ultima APX: 1024×1024 2000 fps color CMOS camera. Capable of 10000+ fps at reduced resolution (~256×256).
  • Flir A65: 640×512 30 fps thermal machine vision camera. Useful for diagnosing hot spots on boards or just general temperature measurement.
  • Microscope: A “DIY” microscope built out of Thorlabs and Mitutoyo parts. Resolves 2um on the object plane and can record high-speed (120 fps) full HD RAW video as well. The optical pathway can also be reconfigured for other experiments.