CATCHER [TOC]

User's Guide for Data Catcher(html, pdf, ps)


An EPICS data acqusitions tool written in IDL language. It is able to monitor 1D or 2D scan. It displays close to realtime plot during scanning. It provides various 1D and 2D plot features and ASCII report generation.

It supports the EPICS/synApp 4.6 or older release of scan record. It requires IDL R5.0 or newer. It only been fully tested on UNIX Solaris system and WIN2000.

The catcher.sav file for IDLVM 6.0 is also available, which can be run without requiring an IDL license.

DOWNLOAD

You can get the tar file and installation infomation from: Download Catcher R3.1 (July 15, 2004)

The catcher package is upgraded to R3.1 and the scanSee package is upgraded to R3.2 in this release. Now it support both old (D1,D2,...,DF) and new (D01,D02,...,D16) detector name convention. It will build with EPICS 3.14.5.

PACKAGE CONTENTS

The complete package include four sub-directories: 
	src/ezca 	 - interface for single PV name CA function calls 
	src/EzcaScan	 - interface for array PV names CA function calls
	src/ezcaIDL	 - interface layer between IDL and EzcaScan
	src/idl		 - packaged IDL/ezcaIDL visualization programs
All the unix scripts and IDL programs are stored under the src/idl sub-directory. 
The most significant unix scripts provided include the following:

	idluserdir_setup - setup for accessing EPICS IDL programs
	ezcaidl_setup    - additional setup for accessing ezcaIDL functions
	ezfit		 - start up ez_fit program
	catcher		 - start up catcher program
	viewer		 - start up viewer program for catcher files
	scanSee		 - start up scanSee program with mda files
	sscan		 - start up visualization tool for scanSee files
	hdfb		 - start up HDF/NEXUS browser
	idlvm		 - start up the IDLVM 6.0 

The most significant IDL 6.0 saved files provided include the following:

	catcher.sav	 - catcher program
	viewer.sav	 - viewer program
	scanSee.sav	 - scanSee program
	sscan.sav	 - sscan program
	hdfb.sav	 - hdfb program
For EPICS 3.14.X installation the IDL programs are installed under /usr/local/epics/extensions/idllib and all the unix scripts and IDL save files are intalled under /usr/local/epics/extensions/bin/solaris-sparc direcory.

After the normal installation, to run any IDL 6.0 saved file on the UNIX system, a user only need to pass the name of the save file to the idlvm script. 

To run the 'catcher.sav' file on UNIX system just type the following:

	idlvm catcher

C & Fortran Interface

Using the IDL XDR format makes the porting of data catcher scan data to other platform much easier for most of IDL users. Therefore, start from data catcher R2.2.2c all the scan data sets are saved in XDR format.

Sturhahn Wolfgang has a C & Fortran Interface program which is able to process the old 1D catcher file using the native binary data format. In order to use his C & Fortran interface on Unix, a user has to convert the new XDR format data to binary format first. To convert XDR to native binary use the U_XDR2BI function.