SPEC and MCA

[Jonathan Lang <lang@aps.anl.gov>]

Pete,

   I have something, based on a macro I got from you a long time ago.  I
expanded and  modified it  so that it saved the MCA spectra in the SPEC mca
format.  This allows CPlot and the ESRFs XPLOT & SPECPLOT programs to
recognize these 'scans' as MCA spectra (and have the right energy scale
etc.).  The macros I wrote can either save one MCA spectra to your currently
open SPEC data file or save an MCA spectra for every point in a SPEC scan to
another data file called DATAFILE.scan##.mca.  I was working on putting in
the ROIs as detectors, but the epics_pv as a scaler function now makes this
obsolete. 

    Gerry did put in the stuff to read the epics mca in SPEC, but it is at
the 'hardware' level (i.e. There are no user macros to acquire / save
spectra as above). If someone had routines using Gerry's mca_sel, mca_par,
mca_get, etc. commands for another mca, it should in principle be trivial to
convert them to look at the EPICS mca.  I couldn't find anybody who had
these, so I just wrote them using epics_put and epics_get calls (which is
probably just as simple).


Jonathan