Having made quite a bit of use of ALBA interfacing over the past few years, I found myself trying to do an experiment that isn't on the appliation menu. I've often wondered about doing experiments that aren't built into the software, as these entail using the ALBA investigator which I'd not tried before.
Basically you work out a group of settings to allow the interface to take measurements determined by you, which is pretty straight forward. But I found I had to manipulate the data after it had been captured.
Although there are some fairly powerful calculation functions built into the ALBA software, for ease of use (and as I'm more familiar and comfortable with it) I exported the data to Excel. After a bit of fiddling about I got the desired product.
This was all a bit labour intensive, and meant that I couldn't show the final result to the class straight away - which is sort of the point of me using ALBA.
The final result did, however, turn out to be much more accurate than the alternative method the pupils used, and it took a fraction of the time to perform the experiment.
Perhaps I set it up badly, or missed something fundamental, but it'd be nice to be able to do the experiments 'striaght out of the box'.
I'm off now to email djb microtech - I'll post any reply here when I get it.
A lot of companies are very glad to get feedback from users - often they are incorporated into the next version or edition of the software if enough people are looking for a specific feature. Of course, if no one lets them know they are looking for something, then how do the developers know to include it? Best advice, always get in touch with the manufacturer if you have an idea - it will make things better for everyone ultimately. Many companies make great use of their 'user groups' (Microsoft/Adobe in particular) - perhaps some of the smaller firms could benefit from this also?