This document provides and overview of the concepts used in OptSuite. It briefly describes the technical basis of OptSuite and the objects and the work flow of OptSuite.

You will learn what MeasurementRoutines are, what MeasurementTools are and how they can be used in OptSuite.

In addition to this Wiki document a paper written for the DGaO 2006 gives a good overview of OptSuite.

OptSuite is written in Java and based on the Eclipse RCP. The RCP provides a platform for plugin driven highly flexible and extensible Java applications.

SWT - the OS-native base of the RCP - is already available for most common systems making it nearly platform independent.

The RCP introduces the concept of extension points that is used by OptSuite so it could describe the most general case of data-acquisition/visualisation and let implementors do specific work. That way OptSuite remains independent and every user can customize it to match exacly his needs.

OptSuite manages the different measurement tasks in so so called measurement-routines. These routines consist of an arbitrary list of routine-steps and can be grouped together as routine-sequences. One can consider a routine as the workflow of a real measurement setup that in most cases will be an interferometer in OptSuite.

The different routine-steps are intendet to be small, reusable and configurable tasks that when combined with others can perform complex measuring functions. Exaples of a routie-step are data aquisition, data masking or data display. Routine-steps are not resticted to a certain task though.

When a measurement-routine is executed all its included steps will be asked one after the other to perform its specific atcion. For routine-sequences one can define an other set of steps that is performed each time the routine ended and is about to restart.

A good example of a routine containing several steps is the PSI (phase shifting interferometry) measurement with OptSuite. Here is the typical list of routine-steps for a PSI-Routine:

• Acquisition (Hariharan)
• Custom data masking
• Unwrapping (Goldstein)
• Analysis (Display)
• Analysis (Zernike-Fit)
• Save Data

Each of these steps, except for the acquisition which is specialized to PSI, could be used in other types of routines.

Eeach measurement routine with all its routine steps will be stored by OptSuite so they can be easily reused.

OptSuite provides a framework for accessing real measurement tool like detectors, light sources, phase-shifters etc. Thes are wrapped in OptSuite as so called measurement tools.

Measurement tools can be used by routine-steps to control parameters of the measurement and perform real hardware operations. Each measurement-tool can provide its own preferences object used to customize the tool to a specific task. Like routines and their steps these objects will be stored by OptSuite so complex setups will only have to be configured once.

Measurement tools are designed as so called singletons in OptSuite. This means each tool represents a single tool in the real world and therefore can only be used by one routine step (or other code) at a time. Thus tools have to be allocated so they can be used and freed afterwards.