How can I control an nPoint positioner from my own PC program?
If your application simply requires the stage to move from one static position to another, you can position the stage through the standard USB interface. We offer both an ActiveX control and Labview drivers to communicate with the nPoint C300 controller by calling simple functions. The ActiveX control comes with an example project in Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0, and the Labview drivers come with an example Labview Virtual Instrument. If you would like to control the stage from your own PC program for a scanning application, the easiest way to do this is by adding a high speed DAC card to your PC. The DAC card will come with drivers and program examples from the manufacturer. The most common high speed DAC cards are 16 bit resolution. This gives you a positioning resolution of approximately 1.5 nm. Positioning resolution is not the same as noise. When scanning the stage with a constant velocity or smooth acceleration, the bandwidth of the control loop and the mechanical momentum of the s
