A programmable ramp generator for laser cooling and trapping

Arduino is an open-source electronic prototyping platform allowing users to quickly create interactive electronics instrumentation. Teensy 3.6 is a similar but more capable platform based on a 180 MHz Cortex-M4F microcontroller with a built-in 12-bit DA converter whose IDE based on C/C$++$ is almost identical to the Arduino environment. Using Processor software to create a GUI, we have designed and built the hardware and software of an instrument which is ubiquitous in laser-cooling and trapping experiments. Our instrument, called RampBox controls the amplitude and frequency sweeps of a typical AOM RF driver. We present the design, development, and performance of the RampBox.