PPI-2000 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s)

Q1. How is PPI-2000 compared to Ocean Optics’ A/D card, PCMCIA card or the SAD500 interface?

PPI-2000 is designed to complement existing Ocean Optics’ products. If you want to have a fully portable plug-and-play spectrometer at the lowest cost without additional battery pack or the trouble of plugging an interface card into your desktop or notebook PC, going through an intimidating installation procedure, and/or you demand a highly stable yet powerful software with features such as on-screen real time spectral comparison, timed-recording, in-built wavelength calibration facilities, fast screen updating rate, process control and automation, and/or if you want to built your own instrument by transferring the 250k-byte software into an embedded PC board with limited memory space and budget in the future, then PPI-2000 can be an excellent choice.

Q2. How do you rate your PPI-2000 software stability and reliability?

Under all possible operations tested, the software has ever found to made the operation system unstable or hanged. The software will discover any hardware fault almost immediately, do some recovery trials and if failed, flag a warning to the user and enter the simulation mode by itself. Thanks to the inherent advantages of the parallel port facilities, the PPI-2000 will always be in sync with the PC. Moreover, the software was written on an FDA-approved software platform which can meet applications that demands extremely high reliability.

Q3. I hate to install new software. Will the PPI-2000 software difficult to install?

The PPI-2000 is designed to eliminate all existing Ocean Optics’ intimidating software installation procedure and problems of incompatibility among various PCs, esp. the notebooks. All you need to do during installation is to copy the accompanied software into a newly created folder on the desktop, copy the OOISPEC.INI file supplied by Ocean Optics into the same folder, double click the OOICNV.exe file to initialize the system and that’s all. Whenever you want to activate the application, double click the PP2.exe file and the system will run by itself. You can even activate the application from a floppy diskette without installing the software to the hard disk or sacrificing the performance.

Q4. If I have installed my PPI-2000 software into my computer, will it affect my other applications?

No. It is not possible. Unlike Ocean Optics’ existing OOIBase software, the PPI-2000 does not change any system settings such as base memory address, redirecting system interrupts and changing the serial port’s baud rate which may affect other applications. If you still are not convinced, load the software on a separate floppy disk and activate the program form there. The performance should be the same. The entire software package occupies only 540kbytes and you should have ample space for some basic data storage, even on a 1.44Mb floppy diskette.

Q5. Will the PPI-2000 have difficulties in certain brand of PCs?

So far, the PPI-2000 has been tested to be compatible with all desktops, notebooks and mini-notebook computers running on DOS, Windows 3.1x and Windows 95/98. The software version designed to run on Windows NT platform is currently under development.

Q6. How do I connect the PPI-2000 to my PC?

The software and the carefully prepared, easy-to-understand, step-by-step teaching manual are included. However, you need to purchase the cable set separately. You must also specify whether you need a large (AT) keyboard connector (CBL-AT) or a small (PS2) keyboard connector (CBL-PS2) in your purchase order.

Q8. How does the "on-screen real time spectral comparison" feature benefit me?

This powerful feature enables you to capture a spectrum from one reference sample, store in the computer and display in on the screen while you acquire the spectrum from another sample. With this feature you can closely correlate the spectral difference between two or more samples "on the spot". Up to two reference spectra can be displayed on the same screen with the spectrum under investigation, making a maximum total display of three spectra on the screen.

Q9. How about the "time-recording" feature?

If you want to monitor the changes of a slow process and you need to record data at regular intervals, you can instruct the PPI-2000 software to automatically save the spectrum for you. The software provides very flexible channel selection option at user-defined recording intervals at increments of one minute. Since each data file occupies only a 4k-byte memory space, you can save a lot of records.

Q10. How does the wavelength calibration work?

You must purchase the PPI-2000 (external connection unit) in order to make use of this feature. The DB9 connector from the output board provides eight independently controlled TTL output pins and a common ground pin to control external devices. You need to contact PC Optics or Ocean Optics in order to program your process control at this software version.

Q12. Can I purchase the PPI-2000 system from Ocean Optics direct?

Yes. PC Optics has authorized Ocean Optics to sell the PPI-2000 system as a distributor. Contact Ocean Optics’ sales department for more information.

Q13. If I want to have three or more spectrometer channels, will the PPI-2000 support this configuration?

The PPI-2000 supports up to eight spectrometer channels. In order to drive three or more spectrometer channels, you must use the PPI-2000 external connection unit or order the P2000-R from Ocean Optics to have the PPI-2000 mother board installed into the MC-2000 rack unit.