Our FTIR – normally a well-behaved and very much used instrument – is throwing a timeout error during analyses. There appears to be an issue with the optical bench of the instrument, one which we have been unable to resolve independently; we are waiting for technical support from the manufacturer. (Thermo, are you listening?)
In most cases, when the timeout happens the software is kind of stuck. My advice is to close the software, reopen it, immediately switch from the ATR to the main sample compartment, allow the instrument to align the optics, then switch back to the ATR and allow it to align the optics, then take your background and as much sample data as you can as quickly as you can. Chances are good that the instrument will soon decide to thwart your experiments again.
Here is a screenshot of what it will look like, annotated with the instructions above.
