Individual solutions for control and data acquisition with the PC

Individual and flexible solutions for control and data acquisition are an important tool for measurements in scientific research, since very often self-constructed or adapted commercial measuring devices are applied. Software which is purchased together with the instruments is in many cases not suitable for research applications, which require comprehensible procedures with high precision and reproducibility. Suitable programmed commercial solutions are either not available or too expensive. This paper presents the adaptation and automation of a high temperature Calvet-type microcalorimeter. It allowed us to perform programmable drop calorimetry with automated additions of samples under controlled atmosphere and temperature as well as signal acquisition at low cost, which does not require any special knowledge of electronics or programming. We were able to integrate several instruments for measuring and controlling via their communication interfaces (IEEE, I/O-port) by means of the program Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench (LabView, National Instruments). The program runs on a conventional Pentium-PC under Windows98. It allowed us to construct user interfaces for the input of control parameter and observation of running measurements as well as the import of acquired data to the evaluation software HiQ (National Instruments).