OceanView: Saving Dark and Reference Spectra in Schematic View

In the Schematic View of OceanView software, which operates Ocean Optics spectrometers, icons represent different devices and processes in your project as nodes, with data flow represented by arrows and links that connect those nodes. The nodes also indicate where data is processed or manipulated.

The Schematic View provides users with all of the functionality of OceanView’s standard view, but with enhanced capabilities including setting a subrange to focus on a specific subset of a spectrum, interpolating spectral data for better mathematical analysis, and previewing spectra in graphs at every step in your process.

Saving a Dark Spectrum and a Reference in the OceanView Schematic
To save the dark spectrum (background) and reference in Schematic View, you must manually connect the reference and background nodes to the Aggregate node.

For example, here is a reflectance measurement in Schematic View before the Aggregate node is added:

In this reflectance measurement example, your next step is to select “Configure graph saving” to add the Aggregate and File Writer. File Writer allows you to save and export processed date for each graph to an ASCII file.

At this point, the Aggregate is still only connected to the processed spectrum (Reflection). One more step is required: to manually add connections from the reference, background and sample, if desired.

Now, you can save the processed spectrum, background, reference, and sample files when you select “Save graph to files.”

Additional Tips on Dark and Reference Spectra
When you’re working in a processed mode that requires you to measure a dark and/or reference spectrum, we recommend updating these spectra as frequently as possible for best results. This is to account for variables including changing ambient temperature and lighting conditions, light source intensity drift, spectrometer baseline drift, and physical changes to your setup.

Also, the dark and reference spectra must be updated whenever Acquisition Parameters (Integration Time, Averaging, Boxcar) are changed after the initial dark and reference spectra have been collected.