FEATURED SHORT COURSE
 Lars Lindstrom National Instruments |
Title | Instrument Control Fundamentals |
| Category | Life Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, Data Management, Sample Preparation, Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry, Laboratory Information and Management | |
| Course | Short Course #117 | |
| Length | 1/2 Day Course | |
| Date | Tuesday, 3/13/2012 | |
| Fee | $335 | |
TARGET AUDIENCE
Managers – learn benefits of leveraging free technology like instrument drivers for improved productivity.
Chemists – understand how to connect all instrumentation and control them quickly and easily.
Technicians – understand how to use instrument drivers.
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This short course walks through the benefits of controlling different instrumentation, from different vendors, with a single tool. We will cover the basics of instrument drivers (available free), considerations for developing instrument control applications, and the need for a full programming environment to include custom analysis routines, connect to a variety of instrument busses (USB, Ethernet, GPIB, etc) and to distribute your instrument control applications to peers or customers. Long term considerations for your application will also be discussed. This short course is meant to provide overview of instrument control technology and help the students evaluate their unique application needs.
INSTRUCTOR BIOGRAPHY
Lars Lindstrom is the Instrument Drivers Product Support Engineer at National Instruments R&D. He has worked with instrument control at NI for over 3 years. Lars has taught numerous technical presentations on instrument control and has been involved in numerous driver development projects. Lars is committed to providing education on software instrument control to empower more scientists, technicians and engineers to program their instrumentation systems.
COURSE OUTLINE
I.Definitions
A. Instrument
B. Scientific Instrument
C. Instrument Control
D. Fundamental
E. Firmware
II.Explanations
A. Types of Instruments
B. Purpose of Instruments
C. Main Instrument Components
III.Methods of Control
A. Manual
B. Semi-Automated
C. Programmatic/Fully-Automated
D. Combination Methods
IV.Instrument Commands
A. Message-based vs. Register-Based
B. Levels of Message-Based
C. Command Set Documentation
D. Termination Characters
E. Shared Command Set in Instrument Families
V.Instrument Control Buses
A. Stand-Alone Buses
B. Modular Buses
VI.VISA – Virtual Instrument Software Architecture
A. Benefits
VII.Approaches to Programmatic Control
A. Direct I/O
B. Software Application Running on Windows-based Instrument
C. Vendor Application
D. LIMS
E. Instrument Drivers
F. Other
VIII.Analysis and Reporting
A. Separated from programmatic control
B. Integrated into programmatic control
IX.Job Responsibilities
A. Who is responsible for implementing programmatic control?
B. Who is responsible for supporting the programmatic control?
X.Programming Language Options and Pro/Cons
A. C/C++
B. Visual Basic
C. MATLAB
D. Java
E. LabVIEW
F. Other
XI.Long Term Considerations
A. Code Reuse
B. Distribution
C. Interchangeability
D. Data logging
E. Troubleshooting
XII.Steps for Evaluating new instruments for Programmatic Control
A. Existing Software Support
B. Checklist for evaluation
