Contributed editorial appearing in
Scientific Computing & Instrumentation 19:4, March 2002, pg. 16.
Humorist Mark Twain once said, “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” I recall a decade ago when personal computers running Windows 3.0 were rapidly displacing the electric typewriters of established offices. These relatively expensive new gadgets produced typed pages with efficiency, but they also introduced the bane of office efficiency, Solitaire. In graduate school, my professors erased the game from all group computers. While under contract at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, a memo ordered the eradication of this addictive application from the base. It wasn’t that researchers and office personnel had a predilection for goofing off. Rather, it was that they operated a nascent piece of hardware in desperate need of useful applications.Fast forward to last Fall, when our program distributed hand-held Compaq iPAQ Pocket PCs to its faculty and some students. We intended these devices to be used as a replacement for paper calendars and address books, with the hope of investigating how they could be utilized to deliver the curriculum. After the first semester of use, Solitaire is the winner, with “mp3 player” running a close second.
I also recall a time when bench-top instruments began to sprout personal computers. This was a welcome move toward increased standardization of user interfaces. Rather than having to navigate the keypads designed around each equipment manufacturer’s concept of elegance, the standard Windows interface and hard disk space of the PC went a long way to increasing laboratory efficiency. Today’s problem is miniaturization. Our instrument room has a new HPLC, FTIR, DSC, and Universal Testing Machine (UTM). In each case, the footprint of the desktop computer attached to each instrument is larger than that of the instrument itself. Also, while these PC’s are not cost prohibitive, it seems a waste to have four GHz-class Pentium 4 computers locked up in a student laboratory. I would welcome the replacement of each of the PCs with a small docking cradle into which I could insert the iPAQ, use its touch screen to operate each instrument, acquire the data, and then take it with me back to my office for synchronization with my desktop system. We could use the reclaimed bench space for sample preparation and not have to worry about the occasional spills and splashes on the keyboards, let alone deal with those cursed mouse cables that have a propensity to topple over cuvettes and other sample containers.
Ocean Optics is one instrument company demonstrating the utility of hand-held computers in the laboratory. Their Palm-SPEC Spectrophotometer is based on their miniature, solid-state 2048-element linear CCD array spectrometer. The entire system, including source, cuvette holder, grating, and detector, has a footprint of 6 x 3.5 inches, is 8 tall and weighs 2.5 lbs. The top of the instrument is a cradle for an HP Jornada hand-held PC running Windows CE 3.0. The Jornada is removed from the cradle after using the touch screen software to collect and store up to 1000 spectra before downloading.
Coherent Auburn Group, a member of the Coherent Photonics Group, has developed the LaserPAD for laser power analysis display. Typical laser power meters consist of a detector head tethered to a control unit containing an analog or digital display. Coherent replaced their proprietary control unit with a Windows CE 3.0 device such as the iPAQ, Jornada, or Casio Cassiopeia. The backlit LCD display of the hand-held computer graphically displays beam profile, wavelength, and laser power stability and trend statistics in the dark laser laboratory.
To the appreciation of Star Trek freaks such as myself, Datastick Systems has developed a data acquisition system for Palm OS hand-held computers called the “MyCordet” This 6-channel, 12-bit A/D converter plugs into the modem port of a Palm device running Palm OS 3.1 and permits measurements to be recorded and viewed in the field. Until a similar device is available for the iPAQ, it looks like our students will busy themselves playing Solitaire while listening to mp3’s.
