When you finish a session on the University of Arizona Raman machine, you will usually be taking home a flash drive with your spectra files on it. The machine will save these in either CSV or SPA format. Crystal Sleuth only understands the CSV format. The new Turbo Sleuth program shows promise of also understanding the SPA format, so it may be worthwhile to save files in both formats.
Crystal Sleuth runs only on Windows Systems. I was probably originally written to run on Windows XP, but I have had no problems running in on my Windows 10 system.
Crystal Sleuth was written in Fortran 90 using some kind of Microsoft visual studio IDE. The program has many dependencies on Windows API calls as well as Visual Studio libraries. Adapting the f90 code to run on other systems would be a major effort.
The program is available for free download:
Two links are provided. One has the humorous anachronism "recommended for dial-up users". This, if nothing else, should tell you how often this website is updated! You want the other link (labeled "CrystalSleuth precompiled"). The difference is only 68 versus 108 megabytes.In September of 2021, I decided to try to install this on my Windows 10 machine. I downloaded the "precompiled" package (CSsetup_large.exe) and clicked on the download when it finished. It warns me that the publisher cannot be verified, then asks for my root/admin password in order to perform the install. It asks some basic questions, then begins unpacking a myriad of mineral spectra.
No new icons appear on my desktop. Typing crystalsleuth into the windows search entry does find and launch the program. The program identifies itself as the May 19, 2008 version. Poking around with the help screens, I am informed that this program requires Windows 2000, XP, or Vista. The download page states that this software was last updated in July of 2009, which may be when this May 19, 2008 version was placed on the web page.
I have not confirmed this, but there is a good chance that this program is the work of Thomas Laetsch, done while he was studying mineralogy under Bob Downs at the University of Arizona.Clicking on "mode raman-search" gives me a busy spinning circle for a while, then a search dialog comes up. I don't get any kind of warning about needing to "compile" the search library. It has not actually performed the search! It is ready to do so when you click the search button. It tells me it has 5129 spectra available and some poking around indicates that these are stored at C:\CrystalSleuth\SearchRecords\RamanLib.
At this point the documentation in the "quick start" guide has come to an end. The online documents are now the best resource.
It looks like the CrystalSleuth install wizard just deposits all of the files in C:\CrystalSleuth. The executable is found here as crystalsleuth.exe. The reference spectra are found in C:\CrystalSleuth\SearchRecords\RamanLib. Alongside of this is C:\CrystalSleuth\SearchRecords\XrayLib, but that directory is empty.
Just for the record, another way is to use a file manager (windows explorer?) to locate the file of interest. Then hold down the ALT key while dragging and dropping the file to the desktop background. Yes indeed, I am new to this windows stuff.
Tom's Mineralogy Info / tom@mmto.org