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= - MCAah / Lise ----------------------------------------- Rainer Kowallik - =
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Measuring spectra with an Amiga
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Since the IBM PCs have occupied the computer market, nearly every kind of 
measurement has been adapted to the IBM PCs (some people believe, the IBM 
PC has been adapted to the measurements).  In fact, doing measurements 
with computers means doing measurements with the IBM PC. Most of the 
measurement systems are incredible user unfriendly, hopelessly unexpandable 
and completely outmoded. The only reason, why they are still in use is, 
that they are standard and have been in use since anno long beard. But the 
advantage is, that these systems (normally REALLY expensive systems) still 
run on a XT with CGA graphics.

With the advent of graphical user interfaces some effords have been made to 
introduce the Atari ST or the Apple Macintosh to this market segment.
But if you want to take advantage of multitasking and intertask communication,
if you need expandability in software and hardware at a reasonable price,
you are left to the Amiga.

But for the Amiga there is (or should I say was ?) nothing in the scientific 
measurement market. Starting with this situation I tried to connect an IBM 
PC Multi Channel Analyser(1) via the ALF adapter(2) to the Amiga.
This worked good, and so I decided to write a really good measurement program,
which should take advantage from all Amiga features (graphical user interface,
ARexx port, multitasking).

I have had some experience before with an HP 340 UNIX system, which read out 
a standalone MCA via RS232. For this I had originally written some analysing 
routines (LISE) , which used the Korn-shell as macro language.

After all this programm turned out to be much more general, than only as MCA
display. In fact you can use it generally for most applications which need 
one dimensional spectra (e.g. Voltage as function of Temperature, Temperature
as function of Time...). You can add a special hardware dependend handler to
the display (and analysing) programm (without linking it to the display 
programm!) and so you can easyly adapt this programm for all tasks you have.

A special PD version is now available from UGA as PD (*). This Programm 
(MCAah is its name) is not scaled down or so, we (a part of the Hyperfine
group at HMI Berlin) are already measuring with this programm at HMI. But we 
(a friend of mine and me, not the HMI of course) are going to make some 
extended versions for special purposes. Since there are so few plug in cards
for measurement available for the amiga, we decided to devellop some plug in
cards for the Zorro bus. Up to now, we have concrete plans for an MCA card 
and an ADC card. For the MCA card, we take an adapted and upgraded version 
of MCAah as driver. For the ADC card we intend to make some specialized 
versions including X/Y writer and storage oszilloscope. The MCA card will
be available at the end of spring 1992 and will cost about 2000 DM. The
ADC cards will also be available in the first half of 1992. The price for
the ADC cards should lie between 500 DM and 2000 DM depending on the 
configuration.

The Software package will also include the on Line Interactive Spectra 
examination environment (LISE) which is also available in a PD version 
from UGA (*). (In Fact, LISE is PD. We only sale the Hardware and the spe-
cialised Software. But if you intend to sell your own Hardware together
with MCAah and LISE you will have to get a licensed version from me, which
 means, that I want to earn some money too.) 

LISE is a collection of CLI (or better SKShell) commands which can be used
to manipulate and display spectra. The graphical output can be plotted (HP-GL)
and it can also be used for inclusion in DTP programs (such as Page Stream)
(Superbitmap IFF). This design makes LISE as flexible as possible. You can 
easily add your own routines and rewrite some others. For LISE, the sources 
are also available in the PD version.

The graphical user interface for LISE is a very interesting tool
for experienced programmers. I made it possible to have a general GUI
for every kind of command line interface, provided it can be called with
a DOS Execute and can read commands from an external file.
The general outline of the GUI can be written to a description file.
All elements are handled as (named) shell variables or as procedure calls.
The description file consists mainly of shell commands, which are
executed, when a button is pressed or a menupoint is selected.
Sliders, togglebuttons and selectionboxes are handled as shell transparent
variables. (This sounds complicated, but it isn't.)
This Tool (MDL = Menu Description Language) is also included in the
PD version of LISE.

If you are interested in the MCA card or the ADC card, you can contact

Joern Ryba Computersysteme   (for Hardware)
Bambergerstr. 54
1000 Berlin 30
Germany

or

Rainer Kowallik   (for Software)
Eisackstr. 14
1000 Berlin 62
Germany


(1) One relatively common application for an MCA is to measure energy spectra
of radioactive material, in order to find out, which elements are in the probe.
For each decay of a nucleus, the detector gives a signal which is proportional
to the energy of the emitted gamma ray. The signal is converted to binary 
format and the corresponding channel = memory location is incremented. After 
a number of decays one has a spectrum which gives Intensities of gamma rays
as funtion of energy

(2) ALF = Amiga Loads Faster was originally a project for a german computer
magazin (c't) which connected a IBM PC Hard disk to the Amiga. The Adaptor
socket just places the IBM I/O adresses in the Amiga memory map.


(*)= UGA PD SPECIAL 19 and 20

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= - MCAah / Lise ----------------------------------------- Rainer Kowallik - =
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