Development and application of General Purpose Data Acquisition Shell (GPDAS) at advanced photon source

An operating system shell GPDAS (General Purpose Data Acquisition Shell) on MS-DOS-based microcomputers has been developed to provide flexibility in data acquisition and device control for magnet measurements at the Advanced Photon Source. GPDAS is both a command interpreter and an integrated script-based programming environment. It also incorporates the MS-DOS shell to make use of the existing utility programs for file manipulation and data analysis. Features include: alias definition, virtual memory, windows, graphics, data and procedure backup, background operation, script programming language, and script level debugging. Data acquisition system devices can be controlled through IEEE488 board, multifunction I/O board, digital I/O board and Gespac crate via Euro G-64 bus. GPDAS is now being used for diagnostics R ampersand D and accelerator physics studies as well as for magnet measurements. Their hardware configurations will also be discussed. 3 refs., 3 figs