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.

The hkl library is a framework for diffraction computation and diffractometer control, heavily used at the SOLEIL synchrotron. It supports various types of diffractometer geometry: Eulerian 4-circle, Eulerian 6-circle, kappa 4-circle, kappa 6-circle, and z-axis geometry. For each of these it provides several numerically computed modes, such as bisector and constant psi.

This package provides a gui on top of the hkl library.

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.

libfreenect is a cross-platform library that provides the necessary interfaces to activate, initialize, and communicate data with the Kinect hardware. Currently, the library supports access to RGB and depth video streams, motors, accelerometer and LED and provide binding in different languages (C++, Python...)

This library is the low level component of the OpenKinect project which is an open community of people interested in making use of the Xbox Kinect hardware with PCs and other devices.

This is the development package containing the libraries and header for software development with libfreenect.

NARVAL is a framework that eases setting up of experimental data acquisition. It is written in Ada, supports user plugins written in C or C++. Using NARVAL, one can distribute many processes across a network to acquire, process, store data online. Processes are of four types: producer (injects data in NARVAL framework), consumer (end of the data flow), intermediate (act as NxM switches) and stand alone actor (no data flow handling, can be used for monitoring).

This package contains shell scripts to ease narval users life.

Contains the programs ncdump and ncgen which convert NetCDF files to ASCII and back, respectively. NetCDF (network Common Data Form) is an interface for scientific data access and a freely-distributed software library that provides an implementation of the interface. The netCDF library also defines a machine-independent format for representing scientific data. Together, the interface, library, and format support the creation, access, and sharing of scientific data.

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 7.1. IDL is a registered trademark of ITT Visual Information Solutions.

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.

TANGO is an object oriented distributed control system using CORBA, mainly developed by the Controls Section of the ALBA Synchrotron. PyTango provides bindings for its client- and server-side C++ APIs. With PyTango, you can write TANGO device servers and TANGO applications (scripts, CLIs, GUIs) that access TANGO device servers in pure Python.

This is the Python 2 version of the package.

TAURUS is a library for connecting client side applications (command-line interfaces and graphical user interfaces) to TANGO device servers, mainly developed by CELLS Alba Synchrotron Controls Section. TAURUS is built on top of PyTango which is a python binding for the Tango library. It provides an abstraction layer that allows TANGO to be accessed in a pythonic, object oriented way. For the GUI part, TAURUS is built on top of the graphical library PyQt which is a python binding for Qt.

The goals of this library are: Provide a simple Tango API to the end-user application Speed up development of tango based applications Provide a standardized look-and-feel

In many aspects, TAURUS follows the same approach as the TANGO Java Application Tool Kit: Tango ATK. If you know ATK, TAURUS will look familiar.

The TAURUS library is divided into two parts: the core module which handles all interaction with PyTango and the Qt module which provides a collection of widgets that can be used inside any PyQt based GUI.

rt-tests contains a set of programs that test and measure various components of real-time kernel behavior, such as timer latency, signal latency and the functioning of priority-inheritance mutexes. Additionally it contains hackbench, a program to generate work for the scheduler.

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.

TANGO is an object oriented distributed control system. It allows communication between TANGO device processes running on the same computer or distributed over the network. These processes can provide services to the control system all over the network, such as hardware control or data processing.

This package provides a TANGO accesscontrol server. It can be used to manage the users and IP addresses that are permitted to access TANGO devices.

TANGO is an object oriented distributed control system. It allows communication between TANGO device processes running on the same computer or distributed over the network. These processes can provide services to the control system all over the network, such as hardware control or data processing.

This package provides a TANGO database server using MySQL.

TANGO is an object oriented distributed control system. It allows communication between TANGO device processes running on the same computer or distributed over the network. These processes can provide services to the control system all over the network, such as hardware control or data processing.

This package provides a TANGO device control server. It can start, stop, or report the status of other TANGO components.

Xenomai is a real-time development framework cooperating with the Linux kernel in order to provide a pervasive, interface-agnostic, hard real-time support to user-space applications, seamlessly integrated into the GNU/Linux environment. Xenomai provides its own API and emulation layers ("skins") to make migration from other RTOS easier. Examples are: pSOS+, VxWorks, VRTX, uiTRON, RTAI, POSIX.

This package contains the runtime programs and the testsuite for the Xenomai realtime system.

TANGO is an object oriented distributed control system using CORBA, mainly developed by the Controls Section of the ALBA Synchrotron. PyTango provides bindings for its client- and server-side C++ APIs. With PyTango, you can write TANGO device servers and TANGO applications (scripts, CLIs, GUIs) that access TANGO device servers in pure Python.

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.

The RT-Preempt (http://rt.wiki.kernel.org) project provides patches to make Linux kernel capable of fulfilling hard realtime requirements. The aim is to eliminate all preemptivity and reactivity problems in the kernel over the time by adding deterministic preemption points. The -rt patches are constantly being worked on for mainline by the community.

Pengutronix's Realtime Linux for Debian project provides builds of the stock Linux kernel with the RT-Preempt patch (but without Debian patches).

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.

OPeNDAP is a framework that simplifies all aspects of scientific data networking.

OPeNDAP provides software which makes local data accessible to remote locations regardless of local storage format.

OPeNDAP also provides tools for transforming existing applications into OPeNDAP clients (i.e., enabling them to remotely access OPeNDAP served data).

 The HART (Hardware Access in Real-Time) Toolbox can be used to
 generate Scicos-blocks for hardware that have a C/C++ interface. The
 blocks can be used under Linux for soft and hard real time tasks
 (RTAI). Blocks are provided for DAQ (COMEDI)

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