Home Page	Products	Price List	Links & PDFs

MCA8000A COM Programming Page

The MCA8000A Communication protocol has been adapted by many people for platforms other than Windows. Because of this, Amptek includes the source code of the Windows DLL to facilitate the programmer's task in adapting the MCA8000A to other operating systems. Between the DLL source code and the Data Transfer Protocol, the programmer should find it much easier to adapt the MCA8000A.

Amptek does not support the source code of the dll. It is provided here to help the user adapt the MCA8000A for non-win32 platforms.

MCA8000A Dlls compiled for Win CE Everex A-20 PalmPC (Executive Model)

Author: Jon Paschal, Applied Physics Institute, Western Kentucky University
Beta Testers: P. C. Womble, Applied Physics Institute, WKU and C. Campbell, National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, Michigan State University.

Notes: Changes to be compatible with CE 2.0

1. CE 2.0 doesn't support the CHAR variable type, CE only supports the Unicode variant of this type which is wchar. So all references to char have to be replaced with wchar.
2. CE 2.0 doesn't support the use of the semaphore synchronization object. Any references to these have to be replaced with a counting mechanism and a waiting while loop.
3. CE 2.0 doesn't support the C runtime libraries completely. It instead only supports a small subset of them. Time and date functions used in request.cpp were not part of this subset so they have to be replaced with windows / MFC functions that work similarly.

Everex A-20 Source Code (116k)

Unix Code

The MCA8000A has been adapted for the unix system and integrated into a larger acquisition and control software package. Follow this link for more information.

Revised April 10, 2010