Program selection, particularly for liquid scintillation spectrometers

Claim 3

In an apparatus for measuring the radio-activity of successive samples carried by successive cassettes of said conveyor means, each said cassette having a plurality of sample receiving locations, a device according to claim 1 wherein each marker comprises an element which is positioned in the first cassette containing samples of a group to arrive at the working station.

Claim 4

A device according to claim 1, wherein each card bears a diagrammatic representation of a control panel of the apparatus and said device includes one additional marker provided with a coded address resulting in transfer of a program set manually on the control panel.

Claim 5

A device according to claim 3, wherein each said card comprises a number of predetermined and visually identifiable positions, disposed in columns and rows, the columns being arranged to be successively read by optical readers of said read out means and the number of readers being equal to the number of columns, and each row comprising a position occupied by a synchronisation mark.

Claim 6

A device according to claim 4, wherein each out of a plurality of said rows bears indications for programming a particular operating parameter selected from the group consisting of energy selection windows, subtraction of background noise, determination of precount or pretime counting, and minimum count reject.

Claim 7

A device according to claim 1, wherein the read-out apparatus has a number n of card receiving positions (n being a predetermined integer), each having an address corresponding to a marker and actuated, when the marker arrives at a read-out station, so as to supply the data on the card successively to a main store of the system.

Claim 8

A device according to claim 2, wherein each said marker is insertable in the cassette in either of a plurality of angular positions, indicating whether the loading device contains the first samples in a group, the last samples in a group, an entire group, or standard samples.

Claim 9

In a radio-activity measuring system having conveyor means formed with a plurality of sample receiving locations and means for actuating said conveyor means along a path which brings said locations in succession to a working station for measurement of the radio-activity of the sample brought to said location, a device for selecting a measuring program to be carried out on a group of said samples, comprising a plurality of markers, each constructed to be removably located in said conveyor for movement by said conveyor along with said samples and each provided with a different address code, auxiliary stores in the form of cards each bearing one of said programs, read-out means having a plurality of addressable card receiving locations and means for reading the card located at an addressed location, means for reading the address code of each marker as it is moved toward the working position for causing said read out means to read the card at the location having the address read by said reading means and for causing said system to operate according to said program.

Claim 10

In a radio-activity measuring system having conveyor means formed with a plurality of sample receiving locations and means for actuating said conveyor means along a path which brings said locations in succession to a working station for measurement of the radio-activity of the sample brought to said location, a device for selecting a measuring program to be carried out on a group of said samples, comprising a plurality of markers, each constructed to be removably located in said conveyor for movement by said conveyor along with said samples and each provided with a different address code, auxiliary stores in the form of cards each bearing one of said programs, read-out means having a plurality of addressable card receiving locations and means for reading the card located at an addressed location, means for reading the address code of each marker as it is moved toward the working position for causing said read out means to read the card at the location having the address read by said reading means and for causing said system to operate according to said program.