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qtegra

Remote Control Server Documentation

Intro

RemoteControlServer.cs is a Qtegra-specific C# implementation of inter-process communication (IPC) for Qtegra, Thermo's software suite for control of Argus VI and other Thermo mass spectrometers. RemoteControlServer.cs was developed by Jake Ross at New Mexico Geochronology Research Laboratory to enable independent client applications, such as Mass Spec and Pychron to control Thermo mass spectrometers running the Qtegra software suite. The script uses the TCP or UDP protocols to listen for incoming ASCII messages from a client application. When a message is received and parsed, the appropriate action is executed by Qtegra, then the result or a descriptive error is returned to the client.

Basic configuration

The remote control server listens for incoming commands using either TCP or UDP. By default the server is setup to use UDP. To listen for TCP commands, in the RemoteControlServer.cs set use_udp to false line 42 use_udp=false;

To configure the communication port set m_port to an open port on your network (default is 1069). line 38 m_port=1069;

For MassSpec 7.868 GetData should return non tagged data string line 43 tag_data=false;

For MassSpec 7.873+ GetData should return a tagged data string line 43 tag_data=true;

For the remainder of this document we will assume you are using UDP to communicate. Otherwise substitute TCP for UDP.

General API description

Conventions used in this document:

[MethodName] <variablename>

The [Main] method starts the server thread, [UDPListen].

[UDPListen] accepts incoming socket connections, reads in the data passed from the client and passes the data string to [ParseAndExecuteCommand]

[ParseAndExecuteCommand] parses the data string into a command, (and value if applicable), uses the Qtegra core to execute the request and returns the result.

The result is then sent to the client using the currently open socket, <udp_sock>

To add commands to the Remote Control Protocol, add an additional case to the switch statement in [ParseAndExecuteCommand] and an appropriate handler function. See in-code documentation for commands included in the current protocol

The variable <Instrument> is the entry point into the Qtegra core. For example to read hardware parameters use

Instrument.GetParameter(<param_name>,out <rawValue>);

where <param_name> is the name of the parameter (e.g. Field Set) and <rawValue> is the data container for the result

To set a hardware parameter use Instrument.SetParameter(<param_name>, <value>);

To use RemoteControlServer.cs simply open and run it from within Qtegra (Status Panel-Script List).

Notes

SetIntegrationTime is currently disabled. Qtegra 1.0.597.6 behaved unexpectedly when the integration time was changed by Mass Spec. Issue may have been resolved in future builds 1/21/14 only an issue with Mass Spec. SetIntegrationTime enabled in version >=009