Overview

BlackChirp is designed to interface with common components in a chirped-pulse Fourier transform microwave spectrometer to facilitate data acquisition, visualization, and archiving. At its core, the program reads in Free Induction Decay data from a fast digital oscilloscope and performs time-domain averaging, displaying the FID and its corresponding Fourier Transform. In addition, the program has the ability to monitor and record additional auxiliary signals at certain time intervals during an acquisition; these signals can be used to abort an ongoing acquisition if their values fall outside a user-defined range. Data are stored in "Experiments" which consist of several files located in a data directory. In order to preserve disk space for potentially large files; FID data are stored in a custom binary format. Experiments can be reviewed and exported in ASCII format, and a set of Python3 scripts are provided that are capable of reading and processing the binary data.

Beyond the basic functionality for CP-FTMW spectroscopy, BlackChirp offers integration with a number of other hardware components that might be common in such instruments: including mass flow controller modules, digital delay generators, I/O data acquisition boards, tunable LOs, and arbitrary waveform generators. All of these items are optional; the program can be configured to simulate these devices and this can be used for recording information even without actual communication. For instance, even if the program is not configured to communicate with an arbitrary waveform generator for creating chirps; a user can still enter a chirp to be used with a "virtual" AWG, and the chirp information will be saved to disk with the other experiment data.

BlackChirp is designed to allow for different pieces of physical hardware to be used to perform the same functions. Each type of hardware device (e.g., the FTMW oscilloscope) has multiple different implementations that can be chosen at compile time. Additionally, certain extra program features such as supplemental laser-induced fluorescence measurements can be enabled or disabled at compile time. Finally, for users who have an NVIDIA CUDA-capable GPU and the associated compilers, BlackChirp can be configured to perform its data averaging on the GPU, which tends to improve performance. For more information about configuring blackchirp, see the Installation and Configuration page.