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by spoiler 1089 days ago
I never realised older scientific equipment even has interfaces for plugging in third party tools! I'm curious, how often do you actually have to make stuff that interfaces with older lab equipment when developing new equipment. And a follow up question would be: is this something you do in house, or do you sell this as a service/products?

And if you're allowed to go into detail, can you give a high level example of this (too low level might go over my head).
1 comments
wmlavender 1089 days ago
Yes, most scientific lab tools have some way of communicating with third-party tools. We tend to shun tools that do not, although some vendors are perplexed and/or annoyed by this. No one vendor carries everything you need.

There have been several generations of scientific instrumentation standards used for connecting products from various companies together.

Some take the form of Crates, which can contain individual modules that you plug into the crates. For example,

  *NIM* - <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Instrumentation_Module> - Started in the 1960s, but there is a ton of these modules still in use.  Lots pictures of NIM electronics can be found by doing a Google Image search for *nim electronics*.

  *CAMAC* -<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Automated_Measurement_and_Control> - Started in the 1970s, but is mostly obsolete and removed now.  It was the first bus standard to provide for computer control of instrumentation, mostly by PDP-11s and then later VAXes.  It could send you 24-bit data words at the blindingly fast speed of 1 MHz.  Some pictures of them can be found by a Google Image search for "*camac electronics*.

  *VME* - <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMEbus> - Originally created in the 1980s as a computer bus for m68k computers.  But it found a new, far faster life as a scientific instrumentation standard.  A number of bus standards like VXI have attempted to claim the throne of VME, but VME is still widely in use.  Some pictures of this can be found by a Google Search for "vme beamline electronics*.
The other major form factor is cables

  *RS232-RS485-etc* - <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-232> - An ancient standard started in 1960, but still widely in use.

  *GPIB or IEEE488* - <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE-488> - Originally created by Hewlett Packard, but still widely in use.  Seems to be on the decline these days.

  *USB* - <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB> - The new contender for the throne.  Its use is growing by leaps and bounds with each passing year.  Bear in mind that one of the largest uses here of USB is for USB-to-Serial dongles that let us plug in the RS232 and RS485 stuff we are still using.

  *Ethernet* - <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet> - Using mostly TCP and UDP, but not always.  This is the other contender for the throne.

  *Short-lived standards* - There were a variety of other standards that had short periods on the stage, like parallel ports, Firewire, SCSI, proprietary bare ribbon cables, etc.  Most of this has gone away, except for the proprietary ribbon cables *(sigh)*.
I do most of my work these days for two organizations, namely MRCAT <http://mrcat.iit.edu/> and BioCAT <https://www.bio.aps.anl.gov/> which both make use of X-ray beams at the Advanced Photon Source <https://www.aps.anl.gov/About/Overview>. The APS is a 1.1 kilometer electron storage ring, which produces high intensity X-ray beams at 70 sectors around the ring. My employers use 3 beamlines at 2 of those sectors for materials research and for biophysics.

You can find a lot of beamline pictures by doing a Google search for advanced photon source beamlines.

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