What's New in Mr. Kick vs. 0.80

What's New

• The trigger mechanisms have been completely redesigned for much higher reliability. This goes for both internal and external digital triggering. Also an external analog trigger is made available though with restrictions and still some unsolved (hardware/driver?) problems.
• Trigger settings may now be part of classification, as a result these settings have been moved from the Acquisition Set-up to a separate item in the Settings menu. Other menu items have been moved for 'recipe order'.
• Classification of triggers include a true refractory period for all trigger modes. Trigger level and hysteresis for the external analog trigger mode.
• The classification of  triggers has caused a minor change in the .raw file format (as of version 0.75).
• Trig Ready/Gate signal is available at DO#6.
• Classification modes include Manual and Stimulus Type with Stimulus Select set to Manual. Both takes advantage of  the new Next Class control on main panel. Via this control the user can specify the next class, if set for manual, or the selection mode - both on the fly!
• Start and stop of data acquisition is available from both the main program and the display panel. Start is available from the menus of these panels as well.
• The single channel scope can be used as a separate tool, started and stopped through the new Action menu.
• The main panel features an overview of the analog input channels, that are active. This includes: Channel no., high/low sampling rate, label, gain/sensitivity, unit and all preprocessing settings except filter orders.
• If the (hard-)drive used to save data runs full, a warning will show up in advance, i.e. when there is still space for approx. 5 more sweeps. In case of an error when data are saved to disk data acquisition will stop.
• Sweep headers in the .raw data files include save time relative to program startup
• The scaling of the Display panel has improved slightly: Automatic scaling to screen resolution during start-up and scroll bars come into play when window width is small (unfortunately it is not possible only to enable the horizontal scroll bar).
• Show/Hide 'Display Y-Analysis' and 'Scope Display 1Ch' from Windows menu.

Bugs and fixes

• Might 'half way' miss a trigger (even an internal), and then stop responding to later triggers until restarted by the user. This has been corrected through the redesign mentioned below.
• Average data are not always saved during data acquisition. This has been fixed as of vs. 0.79.
• Error restarting free running scope tool after use of Stop button on scope display is fixed in vs 0.79.

All bugs should be reported to knl.

Behind the scenes

• Between sweeps sampling of data may be initiated before the end of analog output and event timers in the previous sweep (internal and external digital trig modes only). The aim is to minimize the time from the end of one sweep to the possible start of the next, and allow the scope to display data earlier.
• Saving data to temporary file during acquisition has been moved into separate thread. The aim is the same as above.
• Most user dialogs (excl. LabVIEW error messages) have been redesigned for consistency.