Lims
Hey Spectrolab!
A fellow PANalytical user, cool! I am based in the US, in the state of Kentucky, and I run a lab for an alloy manufacturer. We've been PANalytical customers since the 1960's, I believe, though I heard they had an ARL in here in the mid 1960's as well. I still have a couple of the circuit boards from our old PW-1212

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I started developing a LIMS when we bought a PW2400, running SuperQ 1.0. We noticed it was using a .MDB file to store everything, instead of the flat files of X40. We were able to link the Results and Result Concentration tables to our LIMS and run an append query to get the instrument's analytical data for our use (this REALLY freaked Phillips people out, because they didn't think you could do that. In fact, I don't think they were happy about it). That ability changed after the 3.0 upgrades, when they pulled all analytical data out of SuperQ.MDB and made .RDB files for all archives used. I contacted PANalytical for help, and got nowhere. I also posted on Mike Cheatam's excellent XRF-List server, but no one was doing this with a LIMS, so I was stuck. I knew SuperQ would transmit results files to about anywhere you wish, so I looked at the formats offered (4 I think), and settled on the one that suited us, and then went looking for help at this site in pulling stuff from text files into the LIMS. I had to resort to some trickery for this, as SuperQ results files come as .QAN files. This extension is not recognized as a text file by WIN XP, and XP won't let you add this to the list of accepted text files. I wrote my code to tell the LIMS to go look at the destination folder for SuperQ text files every 5 seconds. When it finds one, it is to rename it to "SuperQ.txt". It then runs the text import procedure, which Wayne helped me write. It then deletes the text file. It will hang up if more than one text file shows up in the folder. But we ony see problems with this if there are network problems, or if the analysts forget to leave the LIMS running when SuperQ is running (24/7).
It's not perfect, but it actually is a bit better than what I had before, as this is automated, and our old setup forced the analysts to click a button to import data.
Great to talk to another PANalytical user, especially from another country.
Good luck. This is the best Access site I've run across, the people here make it great.