MICROSCOPE

Microscope (https://github.com/usnistgov/microscope) is a tool to plot microcalorimeter pulses in an oscilloscope style, with traces from up to 8 separate channels. Plots can include

• Time-series plots of triggered records
• Power spectral densities of triggered records
• Averages of several recent time-series or PSDs
• Scatter plots of analyzed data values vs time
• (not implemented yet) histograms of analyzed data

Installation from git

To proceed, you will need to have installed:

• git
• gcc and make (possibly other development tools I'm forgetting?)
• zmq (NOT necessarily including zmq.hpp--the C++ binding--because we have our own copy of that)
• Qt5 (or Qt4) development libraries (we encourage Qt5)

On an Ubuntu 18.04 or 20.04 system, this can be accomplished by a command along these lines:

sudo apt-get install gcc make git qt5-default qt5-qmake libzmq3-dev libfftw3-dev
#
# If you really need qt4 for other reasons, then replace the above with:
# sudo apt-get install gcc make git qt4-default qt4-qmake libzmq3-dev libfftw3-dev

# If you want to work on (edit) the program, you probably also want:
sudo apt-get install qtcreator qtchooser

On MacPorts, you need something like the following:

sudo port install qt5 qt5-base gcc10 gmake git zmq fftw-3
# If you want to work on the program, you probably also want:
sudo port install qt5-qtcreator

Download and build

git clone https://github.com/usnistgov/microscope
cd microscope
qmake # (for the system default/preferred Qt version)
# If you need a specific Qt version, use one of:
# qmake-qt4
# qmake-qt5
make
./microscope

If you used to use Qt4 and want to switch to Qt5, you first should make clean then remove the Makefile generated in the past by the Qt4 version of qmake step before running the Qt5 version of qmake.

Installation

If one of those methods works, then you need to install microscope somewhere in your path, so that dastard-commander can start it automatically. We have not yet created a make install target, because qmake is super-confusing, so you have two slightly less convenient choices.

First, check your path with echo $PATH. In what follows, we'll assume that you found /usr/local/bin to be on your path.

Method A If you don't expect to update microscope often, then you might as well copy the exectuable into your path each time you re-build it, e.g.

sudo install -b microscope /usr/local/bin

Method B If you expect to be always using "the latest" microscope and building from the git repository often, then you can make a symbolic link once and use it forever. It will point to the executable file and continue to point at any file that replaces it by the same name in the same directory:

sudo ln -s /home/pcuser/microscope/microscope /usr/local/bin/

Check that it worked Now change to an arbitrary directory and make sure you can run the program:

cd ~
microscope