Light and active mobility, as well as multimodal mobility, could significantly contribute to decarbonization. Air quality is a key parameter to monitor the environment in terms of health and leisure benefits. In a possible scenario, wearables and recharge stations could supply information about a distributed monitoring system of air quality. The availability of low-power, smart, low-cost, compact embedded systems, such as Arduino Nicla Sense ME, based on BME688 by Bosch, Reutlingen, Germany, and powered by suitable software tools, can provide the hardware to be easily integrated into wearables as well as in solar-powered EVSE (Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment) for scooters and e-bikes. In this way, each e-vehicle, bike, or EVSE can contribute to a distributed monitoring network providing real-time information about micro-climate and pollution. This work experimentally investigates the capability of the BME688 environmental sensor to provide useful and detailed information about air quality. Initial experimental results from measurements in non-controlled and controlled environments show that BME688 is suited to detect the human-perceived air quality. CO₂ readout can also be significant for other gas (e.g., CO), while IAQ (Index for Air Quality, from 0 to 500) is heavily affected by relative humidity, and its significance below 250 is quite low for an outdoor uncontrolled environment.

This work describes the architecture and the experimental results from the characterization of a 32-channels mixed-signal Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) developed for the readout of the lithium-drifted silicon, Si(Li), detectors of the General AntiParticle Spectrometer (GAPS) experiment dedicated to searching for dark matter. The instrument is designed for the identification of antiprotons, antideuterons and antihelium nuclei from cosmic rays during an Antarctic balloon mission scheduled for late 2024. A full custom integrated circuit, named SLIDER32 (32-channels Si-LI DEtector Readout) ASIC, has been produced in a commercial 180 nm CMOS technology. The ASIC is comprised of 32 low-noise analog readout channels featuring dynamic signal compression to comply with the wide input range, an 11-bit SAR ADC and a digital back-end section which is responsible for channel setting and for sending digital information to the data acquisition system (DAQ). The circuit design criteria and the experimental results are discussed in the paper.

Active mobility and light vehicles, such as e-bikes, are gaining increasing attention as sustainable transportation alternatives to internal combustion solutions. In this context, collecting comprehensive data on environmental conditions, vehicle performance, and user interaction is crucial for improving system efficiency and user experience. This paper presents a data acquisition system designed to collect data from multiple sensor platforms. The architecture is optimized to maintain low power consumption and operate within limited computational resources, making it suitable for real-time data acquisition on light vehicles. To achieve this, a data acquisition module was developed using a single-board computer integrated with a custom shield, which also captures data related to the assistance of an e-bike motor through a wireless interface. The paper provides an in-depth discussion of the architecture and software development, along with a detailed overview of the sensors used. A demonstrator was created to verify the system architecture idea and prove the potentialities of the system overall. The demonstrator has been qualified by professional and semi-professional riders in the framework of the Giro-E, a cyclist event which took place in May 2024, on the same roads of the Giro d’Italia. Finally, some preliminary analyses on the data acquired are provided to show the performance of the system, particularly in reconstructing the user behavior, the environmental parameters, and the type of road.

The General AntiParticle Spectrometer is a balloon-borne experiment designed to search for low-energy cosmic-ray antinuclei as a potential indirect signature of dark matter. Over the course of at least three long-duration flights over Antarctica, it will explore the sub-$250 \mathrm{M}\mathrm{e}\mathrm{V}/\mathit{n}$ energy range with sensitivity to antideuterons and antihelium, while also extending antiproton measurements below 100 $\mathrm{M}$$\mathrm{e}\mathrm{V}$. The instrument features a tracker built from more than one thousand lithium-drifted silicon detectors, each read out by a dedicated custom integrated circuit. With the first flight scheduled for the austral summer of 2025, a new prototype chip, ANTARES4, has been developed using a commercial 65 $\mathrm{n}$$\mathrm{m}$ complementary metal-oxide semiconductor process for use in the second flight. It integrates eight independent analog channels, each incorporating a low-noise charge-sensitive amplifier with dynamic signal compression, a CR–RC shaping stage with eight selectable peaking times, and on-chip calibration circuitry. The charge-sensitive amplifier uses metal-oxide semiconductor feedback elements with voltage-dependent capacitance to support the wide input energy range from 10 $\mathrm{k}$$\mathrm{e}\mathrm{V}$ to 100 $\mathrm{M}$$\mathrm{e}\mathrm{V}$. Four alternative feedback implementations are included to compare performance and design trade-offs. Leakage current compensation up to 200 $\mathrm{n}$$\mathrm{A}$ per detector strip is provided by a Krummenacher current–feedback network. This paper presents the design and architecture of ANTARES4, highlighting the motivations, design drivers, and performance requirements that guided its development.

This work presents the design and characterization of a radiation-hardened bandgap voltage reference circuit, fabricated using a commercial 28 nm CMOS technology, for applications in high-energy physics experiments. The circuit was engineered to ensure stable performance under extreme radiation environments and wide temperature variations. Measurement results show a temperature coefficient of 11 ppm/°C at best over a temperature range of 100°C (from -40°C to 60°C), and a line regulation of 2.5 mV at room temperature. The mean value of the output voltage is around 480 mV, with a maximum variation of 2% when exposed to a Total Ionizing Dose (TID) of up to 1 Grad (SiO₂). The power consumption is 325 μW at room temperature, and the circuit operates correctly with a supply voltage ranging from 0.65 V to 1 V. The core area of the bandgap reference is 0.015 mm². These results demonstrate the robustness of the proposed design for use in extreme radiation environments.