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Re: Spectrophotometer software



El lun, 15-08-2005 a las 21:11, Stephan Gromer escribió:
> Dear all,
> 
> I am working at the biochemistry center at Heidelberg university. My
> "daily bread" are spectrophotmetric analyses: Concentration
> determinations, enzyme kinetics and spectra recording.... As some of
> you may know, the software generally provided (well actually it is
> most often sold for an unbelievable amount of money) is of extremely
> poor quality (particularly the GUIs) and almost always "Windows only".
> Furthermore, in a grown lab environment you have different models and
> different brands, all with different (poor and non-intuitive) GUIs. As
> I am preparing "the switch" of our lab from M$ to Linux I was looking
> for a piece of software that runs under Linux, has a nice and usable
> GUI and is more or less photometer brand independent. So far I haven't
> found a program (possibly using the wrong keywords at Google or sf).
> So I was thinking about a project to write such a software myself.
> The idea:
> - command line tools to communicate with the photometers in a
> transparent fashion (that is the user does not have to know the
> details about the specific photometer he/she is using but just tell
> the PC once which one it is).
> - A very basic (and BASIC-like) scripting language (read absorbance,
> spectra, file IO, move to a cuvette etc.)
> - and a GUI-frontend to the above.

Actually, that's a great idea.

> 
> Unfortunately, I haven't done much coding for a couple of years (did C
> and assembler on my beloved AMIGA back in the 90s....), so I need to
> refresh my knowledge there (OOP seems to remains a mystery to me :| ).
> Furthermore I have no experience in programming C under Linux (GUI and
> the hardware related stuff (RS232 etc)) as I am still some sort of
> newbie to Linux.
> 
> Thus (finally) my questions:
> - Is anyone aware of a (GPL) piece of software that (at least
> partially) does some of my above outlined jobs

As Robert said, Octave may be a great tool.

> - Is anyone interested in such a project or may contribute useful
> hints of any kind?

Today I started my second subject about programming, so now I'm not
_ready_ to help, but maybe in some months...
ITOH, I think my father bought a new equipments for his lab, wich didn't
arrived yet. Perhaps I would be able to contribute with some code for
them...

> 
> Thanks for listening!

Thank you for posting it! A good multi-platform (I mean multiple brand's
equpments) software working in GNU/Linux would be a _great_ advantage.

Damian.-


Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. --
Groucho Marx



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