Thursday, April 01, 2010
Geiger counter problems interfacing with PC
I've been unable to get the DOS software AW-SRAD to work with the geiger counter for some time, on multiple machines, with Windows XP. It's a bummer. I can input the sound pulses from the clicker unit I made into a sound card, but I have no idea how to then get the PC to do something with that. I'm not a programmer. The original geiger counter set up was really simple: it toggled the RING indicator on the serial port.
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3 comments:
I pulled up AW-SRAD and saw that the page appeared to have been last updated in 2001. That's not really a good sign, even if the page does *say* that it works on WinXP. And I suppose you're not especially interested in shelling out for their Windows-native readout program.
My suggestion would be to get your hands on an Arduino board with USB port (around $30) and wire up a count logger. The USB chip implements a serial port from the computer's perspective. It's not a no-programming solution, but that would be much easier than kludging up some kind of sound card DSP.
See, the thing is that's just sticking another computer in between. I should be able to do this via the PC's serial port.
And you probably can, too. However, from what I can tell, setting up an event handler to treat some serial port pin as an edge-triggered interrupt generator is exactly the sort of low-level thing that needs some detailed knowledge of Windows programming. (Heck, even if I was trying to do this under Linux I'd probably wind up fiddling with the C API.)
Here's a VB-oriented tutorial, if you're so inclined: http://www.bitwisemag.com/copy/vb/vb1.html
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