IGOR Pro is an interactive software environment for experimentation with scientific and engineering data and for the production of publication-quality graphs and page layouts. IGOR has been used by tens of thousands of technical professionals since it was introduced by WaveMetrics Inc. back in 1989.

IGOR Pro’s capabilities can be enhanced with the use of XOP’s. "XOP" stands for "external operation." Originally XOP’s were intended only to allow adding command-line operations to IGOR. Now XOP’s can add operations, functions, menus, dialogs and windows. XOP’s are also sometimes called "IGOR extensions."

HEKA provides IGOR XOP’s that add data acquisition capabilities to IGOR Pro. These XOP’s mimic all of the driver capabilities for the InstruTECH data acquisition interfaces in a comprehensive way that offers complete programming control via IGOR Pro. The XOP’s are supplied with the appropriate drivers, XOP itself, help files and example IGOR experiments demonstrating how to create stimulation and acquisition in IGOR Pro.

To use an XOP in IGOR Pro it is just a simple matter of copying the XOP file to the IGOR Pro Extensions folder. When IGOR Pro starts, the XOP(s) will be loaded automatically into memory. A quick look with the Help Browser will display all of the necessary commands for direct access of the InstruTECH interfaces. Functions starting with either "LIH_" or "ITC", depending on which XOP is loaded, indicates that these functions are available.

The LIH_XOP is supplied with a number of example experiments, one such example is the "ContinuousRecording.pxp". This example is a good illustration of the basic usage of the LIH_XOP commands for performing a stimulation and data acquisition. It can also serve as a good starting point for creating your own custom procedures.