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Spectroscopy Equipment Control and Timing Integration

Department​

Chemistry

Summary​

The lab wanted to run experiments that involved taking spectroscopy measurements at a large number of intervals of movement of a delay line stage. This required running separate control programs for the spectroscope and the delay line, with a lab worker manually tending the experiment the entire time to trigger each delay line stage move and subsequent spectroscope measurement, an extremely tedious and time-consuming process. The Research Software Programming team developed a program to control both pieces of equipment, automating this experimental process. The program allows extensive configuration of the experiment parameters, as well as the analysis and display of the results, all in a single piece of software.

Key Benefits to the Lab​

  • Integrating and automating control of two key pieces of experimental hardware removed the need for lab personnel to continuously tend and manually control long-running experiments.
  • Developing a custom control program allowed aggregating results for analysis and visualization in a way that would not have been possible with the vendor-supplied software.

Details​

The initial procedure for the experiment was to take a measurement on the spectroscope, adjust the delay line stage position, take another measurement, do another movement, and so on for potentially hundreds of iterations, with each measurement requiring up to a minute or more to complete. A lab member working on the experiment came across a paper and LabVIEW program describing how this process could be automated, and requested that the Research Software Programming group update the LabVIEW program for the lab’s use.

On further exploration, our group found that the LabVIEW program used significantly different equipment from that available in the lab and did not do nearly as much analysis or visualization as the lab desired. In light of this, we worked closely with the lab members to develop a completely new program which would accomplish exactly the types of analysis and visualization in which they were interested. This involved using code libraries provided by the manufacturers of both the spectroscope and delay line stage to control the items through the new LabVIEW program, as well as considerable communication with these manufacturers to work through details of the equipment operation.

Through many iterations of program development, lab testing, and incorporating feedback from this testing, the Research Software Programming team was able to deliver a program that allowed the lab to run the experiments they desired in an automated fashion and view the results in a format that is best suited to their analysis.