DAPL

SLControl implements real-time control from a Windows enivronment by delegating all of the time-critical tasks involved in an experimental protocol to the DAP 5216a board installed in the host PC. The board itself accepts command sequences programmed in Microstar's propietary scripting language DAPL 2000 The code necessary for each experimental protocol is generated automatically by SLControl when the user clicks the "Run Experiment" button in an Experimental dialog and is saved to an ASCII text file. SLControl then uses Microstar's Accel32 server to pass the DAPL command file to the processor board.

The underlying structure of the DAPL code is very similar for each of the experimental protocols. Links to annotated examples for simple length and tension control experiments are provided below.


'Pseudo-experiments' and more complicated DAPL code

Here is a simple way of inspecting the automatically generated code for any SLControl experimental protocol.

The DAPL code which runs an experimental protocol is always saved as 'dapl_source.txt'. This file is created by combining all of the sub-files stored in the appropriate protocol folder of the Executable directory. Thus the default path for the command file generated by the Tension_control dialog is

c:\Program Files\UW_Madison\SLControl\Executable\Tension_control\dapl_source.txt

If you are interested in inspecting the DAPL code for more complicated protocols than those listed above, you can run a 'pseudo-experiment' yourself and inspect the generated code file from the appropriate directory. Note that if you don't have a DAP installed on your system, SLControl will still generate the DAPL code even though the program reports an error when the Accel32 server routines fail.


Last updated on 30th June, 2003 by Ken.