take a look at alternative tool

EarthSystemDiagnostics / cpt-picarr

MIT License

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take a look at alternative tool #18

Closed twollnik closed 5 years ago

twollnik commented 5 years ago

@thomas-muench You mentioned that there is an alternative tool that can do most of the things that cpt picarro should be able to do. What was that tool called again?

thomas-muench commented 5 years ago

The tool is called LIMS for Lasers.

Probably worth to look at it, however requires Windows and Microsoft Access as it seems.

thomas-muench commented 5 years ago

If we want to aim at a broad usage of our tool, we have to highlight the advantages of it. First thoughts:

We are

open source,
platform-independent,
maintained on a public repo.

We have to

be easier to use (simplicity has to be defined),
have a manual << 100 pages (LIMS Lasers manual has >200 pages!)
...

twollnik commented 5 years ago

@thomas-muench Thanks for the answer.

LIMS seems to do everything that we require. If I understood you correctly, the reason that we are not using it is that we want to run it on a non-Windows computer. Is that correct? If this is the case, why don't we use a Windows VM?

twollnik commented 5 years ago

@tlaepple It will likely be possilbe to run LIMS in a Windows VM on Mac. We could decicate some time to installing and trying out LIMS to see if it is a good fit for us.

Thomas and I had a short discussion about whether LIMS could be a good fit for our use-case. Thomas said that the LIMS user-interface is not pleasant to work with. Also we are not sure if LIMS does the calculations that we want. However if LIMS does what we require, there won't be a need to develop something completely new and we can work on integrating LIMS into the existing workflow. LIMS works with Microsoft Access, so we would need to get a license for that.

What is you take on this, Thom? Should we give LIMS a try?

tlaepple commented 5 years ago

I looked through the manual and manuscript of LIMS and indeed, it includes most of the features we need. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to be used (other than in the lab of the person developing it). From the 11 citations (in 4 years) of their manuscript, most are from the same lab... and the others just cite that such a system exists. The ice-core labs that I know (France, Germany, Denmark, University of Washington etc.) don't use it. The argument (from Hanno) is that it is much too complex.

For us, the main priority is that we have an User interface around our statistical processing techniques and we are flexible to change and adapt things.

Thus my take is to continue as planned, but still try to learn from LIMS (I also have a Virtualbox installed). The challenge is to keep things simple and flexible enough that Cpt Picarr will actually be used in more than our lab.

twollnik commented 5 years ago

Okay, thanks for sharing your thoughts on this.