Debian Science Data acquisition packages

This digitizing software converts an image file showing a graph or map into xy data (coordinates). Some people use it for obtaining the original data from graphs in scientific publications.

Features:

• Automatic grid line removal
• Automatic point matching
• Automatic curve tracing
• Automatic axes matching
• Handles cartesian, polar, linear and logarithmic graphs
• Support for drag-and-drop and copy-and-paste
• Context sensitive help, user manual and tutorials explain every feature
• Preview windows give immediate feedback while modifying settings

g3data is used for extracting data from graphs. For example, graphs are typically published in scientific journals without tables of the actual data; g3data makes the process of extracting these data easy.

Jaaa (JACK and ALSA Audio Analyser) is an audio signal generator and spectrum analyser designed to make accurate measurements.

KTimeTrace is a graphical tool based on Qt that measures and displays data from data acquisition hardware. It captures samples from a data acquisition device, saving it to disk while providing a real-time graphing display.

KTimeTrace requires having a data acquisition device that is supported by Comedi in order to capture data. See the libcomedi0 package or http://stm.lbl.gov/comedi for more information about Comedi.

A digital multimeter (DMM) attached to the serial port is presented under a QT surface. The tool plots values over time, has a simple scheduler for delayed starts and logging after a threshold was reached. It supports spawning external applications, too.

Comedi (Control and Measurement Device Interface) is a collection of device drivers for data acquisition devices. This includes most devices that have analog-to-digital (A/D) converters, digital-to-analog (D/A) converters, raw digital I/O, digital counters, and timers. Well-known manufacturers include National Instruments, Data Translation, and Measurement Computing. A list of supported devices can be found in /usr/share/doc/comedi-source/. These drivers are not included in the Linux kernel source, so if you want to use these devices with Debian, you should install this package and compile the modules.

The packages libcomedi0 and libcomedi-dev contain documentation about Comedi and Comedilib.

In order to compile these modules, you will need either the kernel sources or the Debian kernel-headers and kernel-image packages. For compile instructions, look at /usr/share/doc/comedi-source/README.Debian or the documentation for the module-assistant utility.

A free IDL (Interactive Data Language) compatible incremental compiler. It has full syntax compatibility with IDL 6.0.

The gpsd service daemon can monitor one or more GPS devices connected to a host computer, making all data on the location and movements of the sensors available to be queried on TCP port 2947.

With gpsd, multiple GPS client applications can share access to devices without contention or loss of data. Also, gpsd responds to queries with a format that is substantially easier to parse than the different standards emitted by GPS devices.

The Linux GPIB Package is a support package for GPIB (IEEE 488) hardware. The API of the C library is intended to be compatible with National Instrument's GPIB library.

This package contains configuration files and binaries for libgpib

RTAI is a realtime extension with a broad variety of services which make realtime programmers' lifes easier. Some of them are

 choose between FIFO and RR scheduling policies on a per task basis.
 extended POSIX APIs and message queues, in kernel and user space
 semaphores can be typed as: counting, binary and resource
 a mailbox implementation
 LXRT for hard real time in user space

This is a metapackage that depends on the latest versions of the individual RTAI packages.

EPICS is a set of Open Source software tools, libraries and applications developed collaboratively and used worldwide to create distributed soft real-time control systems for scientific instruments such as a particle accelerators, telescopes and other large scientific experiments.

MX is a data acquisition and control system that is designed to serve several functions:

• As a portable toolkit for writing data acquisition and control programs.
• As a standalone system capable of controlling entire experiments.
• As a platform for building device control servers to be used by other applications.
• As a way of extending other control systems and of glueing disparate control systems together.

TANGO is an object oriented distributed control system using CORBA.

In TANGO all objects are representations of devices. The devices can be on the same computer or distributed over a number of computers interconnected by a network. Communication inter devices is done using CORBA and can be synchronous, asynchronous or event driven.

The object model in TANGO supports methods, attributes and properties. TANGO provides an API which hides all the details of network access and provides object browsing, discovery and security features.

Permanent data is stored in a Mysql database.

TANGO is being actively developed as a collaborative effort between the ESRF (www.esrf.eu), Soleil (synchrotron-soleil.fr), Alba (www.cells.es) and Elettra institutes (www.elettra.trieste.it).

An easy to use Java program that allows you to digitize data points off of scanned plots, scaled drawings, or orthographic photographs. Includes an automatic digitization feature that can automatically digitize many types of functional data.

A Python package with bindings to the "Virtual Instrument Softwares Architecture" VISA library, in order to control measurement devices and test equipment via GPIB, RS232, or USB.

Articles about pyvisa:

• G. Varoquaux has written an interesting article describing the use of python and pyvisa for experimental control. Agile computer control of a complex experiment. Computing in Science and Engineering 10(2), 55 (2008).
• Writing a graphical application for scientific programming using TraitsUI