Design of smartphone-controlled low-cost potentiostat for cyclic voltammetry analysis based on ESP32 microcontroller

Abstract

The electrochemical-based analysis provides simplicity, robustness, and relatively less maintenance. Specifically, a low-cost potentiostat, a basic equipment to conduct electrochemistry experiments and analysis, is necessary to aid small-medium educational units to develop a multifunctional mini-laboratory, particularly for education. In addition, the development of portable and small instruments could be essential to obtain a wider technology adopters implication. In this paper, eSTAT, a low-cost and smartphone controlled potentiostat system was developed based on ESP32 microcontroller. The performance of eSTAT was evaluated from the Cyclic Voltammetry (CV) measurements, from which the accuracy and the error tolerance of the system were determined. The results showed that the eSTAT could measure the Voltammogram signal with the accuracy of 98.30% for the anodic peak current and 87.84% for the cathodic peak current relative to the commercial Zimmer&Peacock ANA POT EIS potentiostat. In addition, the wireless control of eSTAT could be done wirelessly via Bluetooth using an external application made on Android OS.

Keywords

• Low-cost potentiostat
• Mobile smartphone
• Bluetooth
• Laboratory equipment
• Electrochemistry
• Cyclic voltammetry