0.1 Purpose

This is the documentation for the DACLIPS (Data Acquisition C Language Integrated Production System) Software prepared by the author for the project, here after ``the system''. The system has been developed in Phases or Stages. The first was a contract with UTHSCSA to establish a data acquisition for a system depicted in Figure 1 .

Figure 1: Overview of Context.

 

This system was meant to be the basis of a new software tool chain for a specific lab system with follow on elements that would interface with Ultrascan III and system created in the CFA venture that would replace proprietary Beckman device control and data acquisition software on new hardware also being constructed for the venture (Centrifugal Fluid Analytics). However due to circumstances for which I accept responsibility, I was unable to conclude terms with UTHSCSA or the principals that would afford a systems development process with the appropriate maturity to realize the system. This is a typical pattern of being unable to call a client on their lack of sophistication in development processes which I addressed with the standard response of heroic coding to produce a version of the system in question, sans said processes. The final state of my work product corresponding to UTHSCSA Agreement 129665 are in the trunk branch of my public Subversion repository. This actually includes quite a bit done outside that contract as I was only paid for three months for an effort that began, contracturally in March 2010, although there were preliminaries for about 5 months before that. The third party elements in that tree are of course not part of the 129665 deliverables and there are substantial elements of implicit support in boost and other packages which are not maintained separately by me for this project.

As a result of the situation above the system level achieved under the constraints of 129665 I call the zeroth stage system, the stage which explicitly interdicted the proper workout of a system design. Since an adequate realization of such a system is effectively impossible without such a worked out design a good one could only realistically be developed in the negation of the conditions of 129665. The real system development only could proceed once it was totally dead. However to pursue the animistic metaphor, the second system benefits greatly from the code produced in the zeroth stage which is more or less transmitted to the next stage, though I make no commitment to continue that in later versions of DACLIPS.

In contrast to zeroth, or ``flat'' system, DACLIPS provides a generic rule based data acquisition system not specific to any application. Nonetheless the second phase of system development includes the CFA application as a real world sample application. I will be supporting the system as documented here and can provide paid support on an bundled incident or retained period basis. Note that this documentation is part of that service and is not a part of the original UTHSCSA contract which explicitly stipulated that the documentation was to be provided by doxygen markup of the sources.

Everything in the non-trunk branch of my public svn repo for DACLIPS is either subject to the respective third party's license terms or mine as stated in the licenses section of this document.

However I grant CFA and UTHSCA non-exclusive rights to use the full generic data acq system source software in my public svn repo without restriction.