Spexpert

Program which controls measurements on Spex spectrometer in our laboratory.

Requirements

• Windows operating system
• git – to clone the spexpert repository. You can get git from here.
• Qt > 5 – to compile the program. You can get it from here.
• MinGW – it can be installed with Qt (32bit compiler) or downloaded for example with MSYS2 suite from here. From MSYS2 terminal, you can also download and install Qt library for 64 mingw (description).
• CMake build system, you can get it from here.
• Doxygen – for documentation compilation, you can get it from here.
• dot – for graphs in documentation, it is part of the GraphViz library, you can get it from here.
• WinSpec – controlls detector and spectrograph
• 8SMC1-USBh – microstep controller driver
• K8090 relay card drivers – download

Make sure that the CMake, Doxygen and GraphViz binaries are in the PATH variable.

In our case, the spectrometer has to be connected to 32bit Windows XP, so you can't use the last versions of the dependencies, the last version of git supporting Windows XP is 2.10.0, Qt can't use ANGLE so, the last compiled officialy suplied version with OpenGL is 5.4.2 and last supported python version is 3.4.

Getting Started

To get you started you can clone the spexpert repository and compile program with Qt. The documentation is created by Doxygen and dot program from GraphViz library.

Obtaining spexpert application

Clone the spexpert repository using git:

git clone https://github.com/biomolecules/spexpert.git

If you just want to use spexpert without the commit history then you can do:

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/biomolecules/spexpert.git

The depth=1 tells git to only pull down one commit worth of historical data.

Then go to project folder (cd spexpert) and checkout to develop branch:

git checkout develop

and then download submodules:

git submodule update --init --recursive

Compilation

Command line compilation

Open the Qt Console (it should run qtenv2.bat to setup environment, for example C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe /A /Q /K C:\Qt\Qt5.4.2_mingw\5.4\mingw491_32\bin\qtenv2.bat). Then navigate to the project directory and run

mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -G "MinGW Makefiles" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ^
-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=..

If you can't or don't want to use real calibration stage or neslab bath configure the project with these options:

cmake .. -G "MinGW Makefiles" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ^
-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=.. -DMOCK_CALIBRATION_STAGE=ON -DMOCK_NESLAB_BATH=ON

You can skip CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX. Application is then installed to default destination ("C:\Program Files" on Windows, "/usr/local" on Linux).

Then run your make command, for example (-j flag enables compilation paralelization)

mingw32-make -j2
mingw32-make doc       # optional if you want to make documentation
mingw32-make install   # optional if you want to install the application, see
# above

After make process finishes, go to the bin directory and try to run the program

cd C:\path\where\you\want\the\application\installed\bin
spexpert.exe

Compilation using Qt Creator

Open the CMakeFiles project file in the top directory and cofigure it for appropriate compiler. Add arguments as discussed above.

Then compile the documentation by executing

doxygen Doxyfile

from command line from the build project folder.