The purpose
The main purpose of this program is to provide a friendly environment to
Delphi programmers for developing data acquisition program.
The
general idea of the software is to have some virtual instruments (called devices) manipulated by
scrip generated by "procedures" as well as visual presentation (2D or 3D).
The script is the principal mean of communication between "procedures" and the
devices, even there are some exceptions (shortcuts) as data-channels for the
speed sake. The structure of the program has been developed before the software
design patterns came to light, so main concept is object oriented with some
elements of design patterns.
Spectrion is a complete program by itself, but you have to write the virtual devices within Spectrion specifications to your "external" real devices (e.g. AD/DA board, pulse generator, multimeter, step-motor controller). The extendibility and versatility of the program plus some of your programming skills (even moderate ones) to cope with Delphi will give amazing results. Practically it means that you will spend between couple of hours and couple of days to "plug-in" your devices into the Spectrion and you'll have a complete data acquisition system. Of course to adapt the program to every your requirements you will needs more time, depending of what you want. But even then you will have the strong support provided from the existing "skeleton" of the program.
Spectrion structure is “transparent”, object oriented and easily extendable. As it is Spectrion is suitable for visualization of mass-specs, some data processing and PCA/MD classification (one-class classifier kind). Spectrion original aim was to be used for data acquisition and instrument control in mass spectrometry (hence the name - SPECTRoscopy of IONs). Although its main application area is still MS, it can be used for wide variety of data acquisition/automation purposes.
The users
I can think about two types of potential users of Spectrion:
First type is individuals with certain Delphi skills, which need to control the
experiment they conduct within sophisticated and versatile software framework.
Second type would be any company which manufactures computer-controlled devices
or plug-in boards and wants to provide to the users a complete data-acquisition
system plus open environment for further development.
Spectrion is open source freeware under the Apache License version 2.0
Spectrion accepts '-R' as command line parameter, which will switch Device Rack off, so the user can use Spectrion for data visualization/processing.