What's New?
Recent Changes to SCRC Data Capture and Analysis Software
(From March 1996 to June 1997)

G. R. Detillieux

Spinal Cord Research Centre,
The University of Manitoba,
Winnipeg, Canada R3E 0J9

The data capture and analysis software now runs on Intel-based PCs running the QNX 4.23 operating system.
The qcap, dcap and dsepr programs would sometimes die of a segmentation fault after reporting an error in the given parameters. This has been fixed.
The queue buffer length for cap, qcap, cavg or qcavg can now be specified in megabytes or kilobytes, rather than seconds or milliseconds.
The qcap and qcavg programs now correctly report the allocated queue buffer size as a number of samples. What they used to report as samples was actually the size in bytes. This did not cause any problems with the files they created.
Cavg now uses a larger buffer to build its argument list for qcavg to prevent truncation of parameters.
A new program, chanmon, can be used to monitor A/D input channels prior to data capture. It provides a running display of signal levels on all A/D channels selected for capture in your default.cap file.
Cap, cavg and chanmon have a new parameter setting screen which makes it much easier to manage the channel list and divisors. For any channel, you can directly set the channel name, trace and/or waveform number, and divisors or effective sampling rates. Entries in the channel table can be selected using arrow keys or the mouse.

After checking for conflicting run file and parameter file names in a Keep operation, when you Keep parameters after a Set/File operation, or after you Load parameters saved with this file name conflict, the program now gives you the option of cancelling the Keep. (E.g. eng01.prm points to eng03.frm, instead of eng01.frm.)
The Set/Range/Next operation would often get stuck at the end of a run. It now correctly wraps around to the start of the run in all cases.
When obtaining cursor readings from a trace or waveform which has an alternate unit specifier in the calibration information, only the alternate units are shown now, to prevent very long lines containing both alternate units and voltages. If the line is still too long to display, it will be truncated rather than wrapping around and scrolling the display.

The Y-range operation now correctly handles reversed ranges, when the height or level in the trace's calibration is negative, causing the lower bound to be a larger number than the upper bound.
The error handling in the Run/Calc operation has been improved, to prevent segmentation faults which occasionally occurred.

The scale bar lengths are now calculated more accurately. A round-off error used to introduce some inaccuracy in the scale bars on low resolution data (very low sampling rates or very weak signals).

The Calibrate operation would sometimes fail when the pulse threshold was not given explicitly. It now correctly uses the default value shown.
The program now accepts an ADGAINTYPE environment variable setting of "1", for A/D converters with no programmable gain.
The program now treats environment variables set to an empty string as though they are not set.

The "genplot" program no longer hangs when no data is given for either X or Y axis.