Low-cost Arduino-based interface for controlling gas flow in chemical vapor deposition graphene synthesis

In this work, we present a low-cost computer controlled, Arduino-based automation of the mass flow controllers for a chemical vapor deposition system. The major goal of the system is to provide the possibility to produce flow ramps of several gases for material synthesis. We used an Arduino Due board that only has the possibility to control two signals and increased this with a multiplexor so we could control 4 signals. The control board is based on the Arduino open source electronics prototyping platform, Labview software and Matlab's Simulink software. We quantify the quality of our automation system by comparing the Raman spectra of our graphene samples obtained after using our Arduino system, the manual method and using a National Instrument board. The results are very good as our 50 dollars system show similar results with the National Instrument system and the manual method.