A LABVIEW(R)-2 PROGRAM FOR DATA-COLLECTION AND CALCULATION OF FIGURES OF MERIT

This article is an electronic publication in Spectrochimica Acta Electronica, the electronic section of Spectrochimica Acta Part B. The hardcopy text is accompanied by a diskette containing the program discussed in this publication. The main article discusses the scientific aspects of the subject and the Appendix describes the operation and organization of the program. A glossary of unfamiliar terms is also included. The program presented here allows baseline, blank background, and signal waveforms to be collected from an optical detection system associated with a d.c. signal source. From these data, the following figures of merit are calculated: net signal; background; signal-to-background ratio; signal-to-background noise ratio; relative standard deviation of the background; and relative standard deviation of the signal. Because the figures of merit are calculated directly from the collected waveforms and stored to disk, data processing time is greatly reduced and the likelihood of error is minimized, making optimization studies much easier and informative. An example of figures of merit collected with this program is included. Another feature that makes this program unique is that it is written in an object-oriented programming language, making it much easier to evaluate and modify than character-based languages. Additionally, the user interface is graphical, making it easy to understand and manipulate.