Water Cerenkov muon detector near the Angra-II reactor core: the hardware.

We report the installation, near the Angra-II nuclear reactor, of a cosmic muons detector based on the Cerenkov effect in a water tank. The hardware components are described. In addition to details related to the detector design, the description includes the analog signal processing modules and the data acquisition interface to a personal computer. The former includes a preamplifier, a leading-edge discriminator, a rate meter, and a temperature sensing circuit. The latter makes use of a general purpose device named Data Processing Module (DPM), which is here programmed to perform the required operations. Characterization data for every unit are also presented.