Turbo Sleuth

April 3, 2023

Raman utility - work resumed in 2023

The first order of business is simply to get back on the horse and ride what I did back in 2021 (which was not all that much). Here is a sort of declaration of goals and methods:

The sole purpose of this tool is mineral identification.
This tool will only work with Raman data, no X-ray diffraction whatsoever.
No experimentation with new languages or methodologies.
An important goal is that this will run on both windows and linux (perhaps mac also)
Python using the "wx" toolkit is what I intend to work with.

I suspect this will end up "just working" on Mac given the portable nature of python and the wx widget set. I will do most of my development on linux, but I do have a machine running Windows 10 with python installed. You get the Tk gui toolkit with python as a built in feature, but wx may require a package to be installed. Packages to install wxPython on Mac are available.

My work in 2021 was with Tk. I placed this in my Github repository:

Github: Raman project

Using the "locate" command on my linux system, I find my local files at:

/u1/Projects/Sleuth/new/raman.py

When I run this, I get a tidy window showing the Raman spectrum of Calcite, which is what I remembered and hoped for. I also have a file "raman2.py" which offers me a menu of all files in the Raman data set. When I select one, it plots it, just as it did the Calcite. So even though this is not in the Github collection it probably represents the last work I did (on October 15, 2021).

What about on Windows? I find a "Raman" directory under c:/users/tom and it has a .git file showing that I am/was using Git to synchronize between my linux and windows systems. I fire up a command prompt and type "python raman.py" and it works!

A peek at the source code shows me that the python code detects whether it is running on linux or windows and sets a variable to give the path of the Raman library. On linux it is in /home/tom/RamanLib. On windows it takes it from where Crystal Sleuth put it, namely:

\CrystalSleuth\SearchRecords\RamanLib

I can simply type git commands (such as "git status") in the command prompt window, though I remember having a bash shell back in 2021. I can search for "Git bash" and indeed there is such a thing, so I can work with a bash shell in Windows. I ditched the desktop icon for this (along with every other desktop icon I could find), but I should add this to my start menu.

If I launch python and type "import wx", we do not have the wx widgets so that will be a topic for the next page.

Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Mineralogy Info / tom@mmto.org