Knowledge Bank

Todays standard personal computer are quite powerful and are commonly used as data acquisition systems in spectroscopy laboratories. On the other hand comparatively expensive special purpose hardware --- sometimes also software --- is often used to perform the critical tasks of data acquisition. Here a novel implementation of a spectroscopic data acquisition system using the Real-Time $Linuxa$ operating system is presented. This extension to the standard Linux/GNU desktop operating systems provides an environment for applications with hard real-time constraints. The capabilities of Real-Time Linux are introduced and the design and implementation of real-time data acquisition systems on that basis is described. Especially the overall design and the corresponding communication paths as well as the hardware driver development are explained. Examples from the implementations of our data acquisition system for a high resolution laser spectrometer are $discussedb$.