7. FIRMWARE COMMANDS AND RESPONSES
Most software communication with the DSPEC 50 will take place through the CONNECTIONS software layer.
CONNECTIONS is used by all ORTEC software and can be accessed for other software
development with our CONNECTIONS Programmer’s Toolkit with Microsoft ActiveX
®
Controls
(A11). Use the DLL interface call MIOComm or the ActiveX control UCONN’s Comm method
to send commands to instruments and receive responses.
! Ethernet interface — Communication consists of sending command records to the MCB
API and receiving response records from the MCB API. Both command and response
records consist of a sequence of printable ASCII characters followed by an ASCII
carriage return. All commands eventually respond with a percent response record — so
named because the response begins with an ASCII percent sign “%” — which signifies
the completion of the command (Section 7.1.3). SHOW and STEP commands respond
with a dollar response record (which begins with an ASCII dollar sign “$”) followed by a
percent response record (Section 7.1.4). All other commands result in a single percent
response record upon completion.
! USB interface — Error codes are discussed in Section 7.1.2. SHOW and STEP
commands respond with a dollar response record (Section 7.1.4).
7.1.1. Command Records
Commands consist of a command header that may be followed by numeric parameter values.
The header consists of a verb or a verb and noun separated by an underscore; or a verb, noun,
and modifier, each separated by underscores. The first four letters of a word in a command will
always be enough to uniquely identify that word when composing commands for the instrument.
For example, the command ENABLE_GAIN_STABILIZATION can be abbreviated to
ENAB_GAIN_STAB.
Numeric parameters are unsigned integer numbers that follow the command header separated by
one or more spaces. Specific commands require multiple parameters, separated by commas, that
specify numeric quantities related to the operation of the MCB, such as live time or conversion
gain. The command SET_WINDOW 0,8192 has two parameters, 0 and 8192, which set the
window of interest to start at channel 0 and continue for 8192 channels.
Some parameters are optional and are delimited by square brackets in the command prototype
line to distinguish them from mandatory parameters (e.g., SET_WINDOW [start,length]). Com-
mands with optional parameters can be sent to the MCB without the optional parameters, in
which case the instrument behavior will be explained in the command description.
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