Advanced Operations

Visualizing Camera Saturation and Centering

The “show saturation” option in the toolbar allows you to visualize the saturation and the centering of the camera sensor. The option is available for both single acquisition and live mode but is best used in live mode to tweak the exposure and gain settings.

When acquiring spectra, it is important that the sensor does not saturate, i.e. that the electron well composing each photosite is never overflowing. In practice, you will want to keep the signal at about 80% of the ADU limit.

Also, the image of the slit only occupies a small fraction of the height of the sensor. The software then integrates each row of the sensor to yield a single value. It is recommended to crop the region of interest of the sensor to the actual image of the slit because non-illuminated area only bring noise to the plot. On the other hand, cropping too much will loose information and will also increase the noise value.

In the software, the saturation data is shown in red and the slit image data in green:

Time-Lapsed Acquisitions

The Spectrum Analyzer software comes with a companion program called Interval.exe that allows you to acquire spectra at regular interval defined in either seconds, minutes or hours scale:

To perform time-lapse acquisitions, start the Spectrum Analyzer program and connect to the spectrometer. Adjust the exposure and gain for your experiment and enable the automatic logging of spectra. Eventually take a blank measurement if you wish to.

Then, parameter the Interval.exe program for the delay and number of repetitions that you would like. Press the “Acquire!” button to start acquisition and press again to stop the acquisition.

The Interval Acquisition program works by sending “F5” strokes to the Spectrum Analyzer program which will trigger an acquisition. Because the automatic logging is enabled in Spectrum Analyzer, all the spectra will be recorded at your specified location with a time stamp. You can configure Spectrum Analyzer to save in either Spectre or CSV format.

Changing Programs Icons

The Spectrum Analyzer software comes with a companion program called IconsEditor to allow you to change the icons of the toolbar. The Icons Set Editor program will help you modify a descriptor file but you will need to recompile the Spectrum Analyzer software or use a resource editor program to actually update the icons.

To change the toolbar icons, open the toolbar.iis file in the Spectrum Analyzer source code folder using the Icons Set Editor program. The program will list all the icons by their mnemonics and let you replace the current icon by selecting them from a list in the dependency walker window. Once you have modified all the icons, save the file by overwriting the toolbar.iis file and recompile the Spectrum Analyzer program.

Note that the program does not actually copy the icon, which would infrige the copyright of their original author. Instead, the program dynamically load the icons from their initial resource and refer to these using an official and legal mechanism implemented in Windows. This is similar to changing the icon of a file in Windows by right-clicking > Properties > Change Icon.