Application Programming Interface

The Time Tagger API provides methods to control the hardware and to create measurements that are hooked onto the time tag stream. It is written in C++ and we also provide wrapper classes for several common higher-level languages (Python, Matlab, LabVIEW, .NET). Maintaining this transparent equivalence between different languages simplifies documentation and allows you to choose the most suitable language for your experiment. The API includes a set of standard measurements that cover common tasks relevant to photon counting and time-resolved event measurements. These classes will most likely cover your needs and, of course, the API provides you a possibility to implement your own custom measurements. Custom measurements can be created in one of the following ways:

• Subclassing the IteratorBase or CustomMeasurement class (best performance, but only available in the C++, C# and Python API - see example in the installation folder)

• Using the TimeTagStream measurement and processing the raw time tag stream.

• Offline processing when you store time-tags into a file using FileWriter and then read the resulting file to perform desired analysis of the time-tags. This also enables to keep a record of the complete chronology of the events in your experiment.