The CERN@school Frame Viewer

This repository contains some simple Python code for visualising CERN@school Timepix frame data using a GridPP CernVM and the matplotlib software suite.

Disclaimers

• This code dates from 2016. While every attempt has been made to ensure that it is usable, some work may be required to get it running on your own particular system. We recommend using a GridPP CernVM; please refer to this guide for further instructions. Unfortunately CERN@school cannot guarantee further support for this code. Please proceed at your own risk.
• This repository is now deprecated, and remains here for legacy purposes. For future work regarding CERN@school, please refer to the Institute for Research in Schools (IRIS) GitHub repository. Please also feel free to fork and modify this code as required for your own research.

Running the code

To run the example code from a CernVM, type the following commands from the directory you cloned the repository into:

$ . setup.sh
$ mkdir ../tmp
$ python frame-viewer.py testdata/ ../tmp/

This should create an image for each frame in the testdata folder in the output directory.

Note: if you are not using a GridPP CernVM, the setup.sh script will not work as you won't have access to the CERN@school CVMFS repository and will have to source your own version of matplotlib via e.g. the Anaconda Python distribution.

Viewing the images

Any standard image viewer should be able to display the images created by the Python script. On the GridPP CernVM, for example, you can use the Eye of Gnome viewer:

$ sudo yum install eog
[... say 'yes' to everything and type your password when asked ...]
$ eog ../tmp &

You can then view each image by pressing the left or right arrow keys.

The data

The data in the testdata folder is taken from the Crookes dataset, a sample set of measurements made at the Royal Institution of Great Britain during the BIG SCIENCE event of 18th June 2013.

Acknowledgements

CERN@school was supported by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) via grant numbers ST/J000256/1 and ST/N00101X/1, as well as a Special Award from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. The CERN@school Collaboration would also like to acknowledge the support provided by the GridPP Collaboration in terms of both computing resources and technical guidance from collaboration members.

Useful links

• Setting up a GridPP CernVM;
• The Crookes dataset on FigShare;
• The Institute for Research in Schools (IRIS) homepage;
• The IRIS CERN@school website;
• The Official IRIS GitHub Organization.