tec5USA Software and Driver components for spectral data acquisition and processing have a modular design, allowing flexible adaption to diverse hardware configurations. Device drivers, for all of tec5USA’s hardware and spectrometers, are available for supported Windows OS. The library SDACQ32MP directly accesses these device drivers, providing functions to configure the operating electronics and to acquire spectral data.
Windows Kernel Mode Device Drivers: The interface electronics (PCIe, USB) are supported by proprietary device drivers. As an extension to the operating system, they manage the direct communication with the corresponding electronics hardware. The drivers are accessed by the API of the function library SDACQ32MP. This library is used for configuring and parameter setting of the operating electronics, and provides a set of readout modes, data acquisition functions and several additional control functions.
Software Development Kits (SDKs): With the intention to enable customers programming their own application software, the SDKs contain files and documentation for the suitable function library. The declaration files for functions and constants primarily support the programming languages C, C++ and C# for direct implementation. SDKs also contain a number of programming examples. The libraries SDACQ32MP and SDPROC32 are provided as 32- and 64-bit modules.
Software Development Kit for SDACQ32MP: This SDK is used to directly access the SDACQ32MP.DLL, the common baseline of all tec5USA software products. It provides functions allowing to set hardware parameters, spectral data acquisition and supports additional functions. The device drivers are accessed directly by the library, taking into account their specific hardware properties. A number of different hardware architectures can be accessed by a single software interface, enabling programmers to design application software which operates independent of the operating electronics type. The function library can access several operating electronics of the same type concurrently, making quasi-simultaneous acquisition of spectral data from different sensors possible.
Software Development Kit for SDPROC32: The SDK is used to directly access the function library SDPROC32.DLL. Based on SDACQ32MP, this library provides a software interface with further hardware abstraction and basic spectral data processing functions generally used in spectroscopy applications. It provides standard functions like interpolation, calculation of transmission and absorbance, joining of two sensor channels as well as a set of data preprocessing functions (e.g. baseline correction). This SDK contains functionality at a higher abstraction level, passing conditioned data to the application software (wavelength oriented, interpolated). The SDPROC32 library is used by most spectroscopy application programs developed by tec5USA (e.g. MultiSpec® Pro II).
Software Development Kit for LabVIEW™: The programming environment LabVIEW™ from National Instruments is commonly used for graphical design of process software applications. LabVIEW™ instrument drivers are offered by tec5USA for direct access to the operating electronics. They contain a number of sub-VIs, reflecting most of the functionality available in the SDACQ32MP library. Numerous sub-VIs for spectral data processing are also provided (calculation of the wavelength table from the sensor calibration coefficients, interpolation of spectral data, absorbance and transmission calculation, spectral data export to ASCII and JCAMP files).
AdminTool: The AdminTool is an application software for use with tec5USA operating electronics and spectrometer systems, for test and parameter setting purposes. It is used to acquire and display of pixel-related spectral data, to enter e.g. sensor parameters [sensor type, pixel count, sensor coefficients] and to permanently store these parameters to the hardware. The acquired spectral data may be exported in ASCII format for further processing.
Customer Specific Solutions: If the desired software solution has special requirements, customized application programming may be designed and implemented by tec5. To this end, our programming experts have access to variety of existing software components available internally and to their experience from developing many standard and specific applications. For realization in Windows operating systems, e.g. technologies like C# with .NET & WPF or native C++ may be applied. Simple solutions sometimes may be even implemented directly as an extension to an MS Excel application.