Arduino-based laboratory instruments for an undergraduate laser cooling experiment

Arduino is an inexpensive open-source microcontroller platform designed for quick development turn-around and easy interfacing, making it ideal for novice programmers and instrument designers. Based on Atmel ATMEGA microcontroller chips, the Arduino boards are programmed with standard C/C++ code and contain sufficient inputs and outputs (both digital and analog) for basic data acquisition and device control. Here we present home-built Arduino-based instruments commonly used in laser-cooling experiments, such as a wavelength meter and temperature controller. We describe the design and performance of these instruments.