Serious bugs in the SR400 gated photon counter LabVIEW drivers

[Paul Henning]

If I remember correctly, the SR400 requires a dwell time between count periods for transferring data to memory, resetting the counters, etc, with a minimum value of 2 ms. I do not think it is possible to set the dwell time to any value lower than 2 ms.

Although I am completely speculating on your measurement task, you could increase the number of count periods (N) to 20, 100, etc, but you will still incur a dwell time between periods.  How important is this 2 ms to your task? Can you lower the repetition rate of the source/trigger? Could you please provide some more details.

[jfrech14]

Wanted to say thank you for the "Read Data" vi. I have a project written that incorporates the files in the project on the National Instruments page for the SR400. I had to change a ton but I got the entire machine controllable through GPIB except for reading the buffer and you saved me days of work with that vi! I am glad NI keeps these old posts around. I also wish our RS232 drivers worked 

Thanks again!

Josh

[horico]

Hello! 

I've been trying to rewrite it to control the Trigger voltage and o read channel A. I haven't had luck in getting the instrument to respond to the other codes uploaded here, would you be able to share your work on the VI so far? It sounds like what you're using may be just what I've been trying to make.

Nicolas

[jfrech14]

On my system, this controlled basically everything we needed it to control in my colleague's experiment. I am not a software engineer and the code may not be any good. But, it worked great for us. It would run days or weeks at a time. We needed to restart the program every now and then because communication would get disrupted. But, again, it worked great for us. It was saved as a LV2015 project.

Some structures were placed there simply for development purposes and weren't removed even if its contents were. I wrote this for a colleague and once it worked I went back to work on my project. So, it was left as is once he was getting data. I also have other external inputs from a DAQ that you might need to remove in order for it to run properly. I had a version without the DAQ there, but it got lost during cleanup after his graduation since it was a year ago. Let me know if there is anything I need to clarify or can help with. The code is a mess. I was changing it on the fly as he needed new things or as I needed to fix/calibrate things and it never got cleaned up.

[horico]

Hello! 
Thank you for your quick reply, I wanted to fiddle with it bit before I responded.

Current;y I am having issues with it opening the library file although I am running LV2017, and in theory it should be backwards compatible. It seems to recognize it was a "newer" LV file than I can run. Do you happen to know if it could have been updated to 2018 from your colleague's work? I appreciate the help especially since it was a project that was not your own. 

I am also not a software developer and very new to programming in labview so I really appreciate your support.

I looked in the VIs and didn't seem to find the location you mentioned the DAQ inputs I'd have to remove. Are they under DAQ or Data acquirer in the code or should I be looking for other names for the components? 

thank you in advance! 

[jfrech14]

I can either try to find the stripped down sr400 code or edit out the extra stuff in the next few days and share it as a lv2017 file. I opened it in 2019 and it must have saved as 2019 even though I didn’t edit it. 

[horico]

That would be incredibly helpful. Thank you for offering to do so. 

[jfrech14]

This should open as a 2017 file. The DAQ input is initialized in the beginning and you can just follow the traces and delete them as necessary. I believe it is only two AI, the wavemeter and the PMT. The data is taken in the "Start Scan" tab where basically the rest of the code is that is used. I ended up having a busy weekend, so if you have a hard time with it I will be able to edit it more later.