How to improve old Bruker spectrometers?
N.D. Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry,
Russian Academy of Sciences

Scheme

Within our improvement program, we linked the DataBus of Aspect to the printer port of PC. The self-made connecting interface divides each Aspect word (24 bits) into three bytes and sends them sequentally to PC, or gets three bytes from PC combining them into one Aspect word. The data transfer rate is about 100 KB/sec.

The support of our interface required modification of Adakos-89. The PC running under MS-DOS ('PC-box') is connected to LAN via Ethernet. It also allowed to replace Silent and Cherry keyboards with standard PC keyboards. Except the obvious convinience such as using right keypad for Y-scaling, it consumes connecting the barcode reader between the keyboard and PC-box. PC system requirements are the following: Intel-compatible CPU 286 or higher, at least 1MB memory, hard disk depending on your needs. The monitor is optional but convenient.

This very simple system revealed the following advantages:

PC box
  1. Fast Adakos and DISNMR access to the hard disk of PC, as /=D7. This gives the unlimited disk space for the storage of local spectra.
  2. Fast access to this disk (=D7) from any workstation within LAN. 16KW spectrum is transfered for less than 1 sec.
  3. All the FIDs acquisited are automatically stored on the spectral server. This special spectral FTP-server (ftp://nmr-service.ioc.ac.ru) was established for external data processing, so that any registered scientist may take his FIDs to process at his PC.
  4. PC-box is used as retranslator for spectra printing and external storage. Each plotcode passed from Aspect port D is stored in the chemist's directory on the spectral server and forwarded to the nearest network printer. Using the laser printer instead of the Aspect's plotter increses the routine work productivity.
  5. PC-box emulates the Aspect terminal, forwarding each keycode to the Aspect port A. The barcode reader connected between keyboard and PC-box allows fast entering the spectrum title (off the sample label) excluding mistypes. Command history list and hotkeys (ALT-key) were also made available.
  6. PC-box adds the chemical structure (if the structure file is found on the spectral server) and the bar code (title) to each plotcode it transferres.
  7. The record about each spectrum is added to the database and every morning the report is updated. It includes information about any activity in our lab: who, when, what, at which spetctrometer, for whom and how many.
  8. "Intel Outside!". FIDs may be Fast-Fourier-Transformed at PC box. Using PC-box as FT-coprocessor significantly increases the speed of Fourier Transformation

All these advantages allowed us to increase the quality and productivity of the routine spectral services on our old spectrometers more than three times.


Besides this we set up self-made aluminium tinfoil Faraday shields in all 5 mm probeheads, which resulted in significant line shape improvement.


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