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Photon-HDF5 / photon-hdf5

Photon-HDF5 Reference Documentation
http://photon-hdf5.readthedocs.io/
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nanotimes and time_reversed flag #22

Closed tritemio closed 9 years ago

tritemio commented 9 years ago

In nanotimes_specs there is the flag time_reversed that says where the time axis orientation of nanotimes array is reversed or not.

This is redundant. Would be better to always use the convention that time axis is not reversed and eliminate the time_reversed flag.

There is a conceptually different information that we may want to save: whether the TCSPC setup have start-stop inverted (start with photon, stop with laser sync) as customary, or not.

It seems to me that this information is not useful. Also saving this would 100% rely on the user setting the correct value at conversion file.

I propose to don't add any additional flag for this field for now. It can always added later if the need arise. Conversely, if we add the flag we have to keep it forever to assure backward compatibility.

@smXplorer, @talaurence do you agree with the proposed changes (removing time_reversed)?

smXplorer commented 9 years ago

Sure, as long as it is clearly prescribed that photon-hdf5 ns-ALEX files needs to have nanotimes saved in such a way that lifetime decay histograms have the proper orientation.

tritemio commented 9 years ago

I will add a note to the docs.