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What's New?
Recent Changes to SCRC Data Capture and Analysis Software
(From May 2007 to September 2010, beta release)
G. R. Detillieux
Spinal Cord Research Centre,
The University of Manitoba,
Winnipeg, Canada R3E 0J9
Capture
- Added networked capture capability to calibrate, qcap, dcap, chanmon and cavg.
Implements a client/server model, where any of these programs can capture
from a server over a TCP/IP network, allowing remote data capture.
- Fixed handling of clock control flags to work with all known PowerDAQ
drivers, PD2 & PDL boards.
Updated to support PowerDAQ 3.6.20 driver.
- Fixed signal handling and timeout handling in PowerDAQ capture code to
work properly on multi-processor systems.
- Fixed signal handling for queued capture so it ends gracefully after an
interrupt, and flushes out buffered data.
It also now writes a preliminary run header as soon as capture starts,
so that an aborted capture can be salvaged with salvagerun.
- Fixed display of free disk space to properly handle mount points that
aren't devices under /dev, or where device under /dev can't be opened
or isn't a block device (e.g. for coLinux).
- Added new cap parameter setting screen layout with bigger parameter set name
fields, for X Window systems.
- Changed dcap to handle "-" as output file name,
capturing raw data and sending it to standard output.
- Fixed dcap raw file size calculation to avoid overflow.
Added extra checking of qcap or dcap parameters to ensure valid run length
and avoid errors caused by parameters that are too long.
- Fixed output file name handling to avoid doubling up .frm suffix if it's
included in the specified file name.
- Fixed chanmon to fill in gaps in display when signal jumps from one level
to another between buffers, or when not refreshing the display at every
buffer full.
Added .5V tick marks in chanmon display.
- Added small delay in neuro front-end program, when starting cap in
xterm window, to avoid xterm's window covering cap's parameter window.
Analysis
- Changed default value of "Zero-lag filtering" to No,
as it can cause timing problems for starts of bursts.
Added note to manual page and help file to explain this.
- Fixed problem introduced in "Round out scale bars" option which could
cause segmentation fault in spike histogram plots, and missing tick
marks on X axis in other graphs.
- Fixed display scale calculations for visual waveform level parameter
setting to avoid overflows when sample range is large (full 16-bit samples).
- Fixed Go and Calibration/View to avoid buffer overflows caused by very long
run descriptions or titles.
- Fixed help function to prevent caching analysis type menus,
to avoid incorrect help page for Raw/Average menus.
- Reformatted help pages to get rid of hyphenation and extra spacing, so they
display well on screen and as web pages.
- Expanded help pages describing analysis methods to avoid excessive references
to similar methods, and instead describe each one fully.
- Enhanced web help to show parameter and analysis method names in text as
links to their own help pages.
- Integrated a number of analysis scripts from the web site archive into the
main software package, with updates and documentation:
avgspfrq, spfrqpeel, spfrqramps, gensspp, getwfdata, getrundata, crosscorr,
wf2tr.
Axon2run
- Fixed axon2run to properly convert ABF floating-point files.
- Added -d option to axon2run utility, to get capture date/time from ABF files.
- Updated ftype utility to recognize ABF2 file type and give extra information
about ABF files.
Asc2run
- Added a -u option to asc2run to allow specifying arbitrary units other
than Volts.
- Fixed asc2run to do proper clipping to avoid under/overflow and warn
the user to reduce the -m value.
- Fixed asc2run to ignore blank lines and use labels on the first line
for waveform names.
- Fixed a problem in asc2run and atf2run which caused improper byte-swapping
of converted samples on systems configured for network capture.
Miscellaneous
- System support for the software has been extended to include
Cygwin/X on Microsoft Windows systems, for analysis and networked capture.
- Updated source to build on 64-bit (x86_64) architectures.
Also updated system error reporting for compatibility with current Linux
systems.
- Changed Linux version to use ncurses library instead of termcap,
for Ubuntu, Debian and newer Fedora distributions.
- Fixed signal handling in keyboard input handler to work properly
on multi-processor systems (restart interrupted system calls).
This fixes the problem of incomplete or garbled screen updates in calibrate.
- Fixed a problem which caused some Run/Calc operations in qm to fail
when two cursors resolved to the same data point.
- Fixed a problem in convfrm and dat2run which caused incorrect conversion to
run files since changes introduced for supporting more than 16 waveforms.
- Fixed frmsel, qm and wtsum to avoid buffer overflows
caused by long run descriptions or file names.
- Added hpgl2svg program to convert HPGL plots to SVG
(Scalable Vecor Graphics) drawing files.
- Added support to hpgl2psc, hpgl2cps and hpgl2pdf for true PostScript text
labels, rather than always rendering HPGL text labels using vector fonts.
Added handling for -t, -f, -r and -m options to hpgl2gif, which are passed
to the back-end HPGL conversion program (hpgl2ras, hpgl2xpm or hpgl2psc).
Added handling for PostScript font selection in hpgl2psc's -f option,
with capitalized font names for PostScript fonts and others for vector fonts.
- Fixed hpgl2gif to use an rgb.txt file included in this package,
rather than using the X11 package's rgb.txt file directly,
which isn't consistently installed in the same place.
- Changed wf2mp3 to use standard "lame" encoder utility, rather than the older,
non-standard notlame utility.
- Fixed a bug in sdump's file name incrementing that caused it to lose
digits in some cases.
- Increased field size for directory name in neuro program parameter screen.
- Fixed calculation of initial window size to work better on dual-head
systems under X-Win32 and to allow room for top/bottom menu/task bars.
- Fixed file name expansion to fully qualified names for Linux systems,
to avoid problems with some mount points (e.g. for coLinux).
Directory of What's New Listings
SCRC WWW administrator:
www@scrc.umanitoba.ca
Copyright © G. R. Detillieux, Spinal Cord Research Centre, The University of Manitoba.