Adding Beam Seconds programmatically.

hourigan

Background:

I am importing either FIN2 or DAT files from the Element
Each file represents an analysis of 1 spot with n seconds of baseline followed by m seconds of laser on
The files names are the sample names
Historically (iolite 3.5) we have used "gaps" to deal with beam seconds. With all of this, we have never needed to use a laser log file to handle our data.
We would like to continue without needing laser log files.

In Iolite 4 we can ascribe beam seconds with gaps between samples but the beam seconds channel is set to zero at the start of the file. Really what we want is for beam seconds to start at zero when the laser comes on after n seconds of baseline. Is there a simple way to do this without the log file or using thresholds?

I have written an importer for the raw element *.dat files. In theory, I could edit the importer to write the beam seconds channel on import but I don't know if the DRS would ultimately overwrite it. Thoughts?

Jeremy

Bence

Hi Jeremy,

At the moment, if you were to create BeamSeconds at import, when you run the DRS it will overwrite what's there.

We can add an option to not calculate BeamSeconds in the DRS (there is another group we're working with where this would be handy), but just a quick question for my own edification: does it matter that BeamSeconds doesn't start at 0? As long as the DH corrected data are flat it shouldn't matter, and I thought the fit would just take into account that BeamSeconds doesn't start at 0, but there could be situations where this isn't true.

Is this what you've encountered?

-Bence

hourigan

Bence

I created a little widget that reverse-engineers that laser log file from the raw data files, so I have a workaround at this point.

To answer your question about whether it matters, I don't really know. I am having some other issues with baseline subtraction so I thought that beam seconds be contributing to the problem.

In terms of workflow, one basically has to put the laser-start delay (plus a bit for transport to the ICP) as the Start trim in the DHF windows in order to trim out wonky data at the beginning.