A general firewire data acquisition platform applied to SPECT

A sub-system that provides the low-level interface to the IEEE 1394 serial bus (Firewire) has been developed. It is intended to be used as a component providing communication and distributed computing in a data acquisition or control system. IEEE 1394 has a flexible topology and provides large bandwidth capabilities to a system. The platform developed consists of a custom made DSP board executing software that manages the bus protocol and provides an environment for executing data processing or control algorithms. Software running in a PC that encapsulates the low-level API to a Firewire/PCI bridge card is also part of the platform.