waterfall

This README is for version 0.2dev.

Radioastronomy utility. For more information, see the MLAB wiki.

Table of Contents

• Compilation
• Configuration
• Usage
• ChangeLog

Compilation

1. Install the following libraries:

   • libfftw3 (http://www.fftw.org/download.html)
   • cfitsio (http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/fitsio/)
   • JACK (http://jackaudio.org/download)

   On a debian system, they can by installed using: sudo apt-get install libfftw3-dev cfitsio-dev clang

on Ubuntu run:

sudo apt-get install libfftw3-dev cfitsio-dev libjack-jackd2-dev

1. Clone the repository using (for instance): git clone https://github.com/MLAB-project/radio-observer.git.
2. Checkout and build the cppapp submodule:

    $ git submodule init
    $ git submodule update
    $ cd cppapp
    $ make
   

3. In the radio-observer directory, run make. The resulting binary, named waterfall, should appear in the project's root directory.
4. If anything goes wrong, please send me an email with the output at milik.nosp@m.jan@.nosp@m.fit.c.nosp@m.vut..nosp@m.cz .

Configuration

The program attempts to read a config file in the user's home directory called .waterfall. Example config file is stored in waterfall/watefall.cfg. You can copy it to your home directory and edit as you like ($ mv waterfall.cfg $HOME/.waterfall).

Usage

$ waterfall [WAV_FILE]

Without the WAV_FILE argument, waterfall attempts to connect to a jack server and then listen forever to the data sent by Jack. If WAV_FILE is specifed, waterfall uses WAV frontend, reads the WAV file and exits. In either case, the program stores the resulting data in a series of FITS files (snapshots) in its current working directory (the directory from which you run the program).

Currently, the format of the snapshot file name is snapshot_LOCATION_YEAR_MM_DD_HH_mm_ss.fits, where LOCATION is the value of the location configuration option, YEAR is a four-digit year, MM is two-digit month, DD two-digit day and so on.

Despite there being a log_file configuration option, the log is currently written only to the stderr. To append it to a file, do output redirection ($ waterfall 2> your_log_file.log).

Fits file handling: FITS can be converted in png by fits2png script. sudo apt-get install python-pyfits

ChangeLog

See CHANGELOG.md.