Display and Manipulate MCA Data

Armando Solé and colleagues at ESRF have developed a very nice display and analysis utility called PyMCA. The application can display live-time images of MCA data collected in spec's shared memory arrays. Download PyMCA from pymca.sourceforge.net.

Mine the ESRF Macro Collection

The Beamline Instrument Software Support group (BLISS) at ESRF is in charge of the beamline control software for over 30 beamlines. The BLISS folks have developed a large collection of spec macros. Many can be used as is, others can be adapted. Check them out.

Try a Light-Weight GUI Front End to spec

Guy Jennings at the BESSRC CAT at the Advanced Photon Source has written a straightforward graphical-interface front end to spec called Specfe Specfe is a graphical front end program intended to aid the use of the spec data acquisition software. Specfe is able to display interactive graphs of data scanned by spec, to present a user-friendly graphical interface to several of the more common spec commands and to present a unified 'tweaking' interface to the spec motors and counters.

See How the ESRF GUI For spec Is Coming Along

The ESRF BLISS folks are also developing a graphical user interface for spec. Online documentation is available.

Read spec Data Files With A Tcl/Tk GUI

Pete Jemian of UNICAT at the Advanced Photon Source has submitted a compact graphical interface written in Tcl/Tk that displays scans from a spec data file and provides controls for selecting which scan and which columns to extract and save to a new file. Download the Tcl script here (update July 31, 2008).

Read spec Data Files From Windows95

ScanRead is a Windows95 program for reading spec data files, for instant scientific plots of the data and for extracting scans to ASCII files for subsequent analysis. In addition, detailed information about how to combine ScanRead with the scientific graphics program Microcal Origin (TM) is provided, as well as some sample Origin macros for data analysis. ScanRead can be obtained free of charge from Ken Ritley (k-ritley at dxray.mpi-stuttgart.mpg.de) at the Max Planck Institute for Metal Research, Heisenbergstr. 1, D-70569, Stuttgart, Germany. Also, all 4.5 Mbytes of NEW Version 3.51 (October 10, 1999) can be downloaded here. There are two readme files also available, one general and one dealing with Microcal Origin usage.

Connect To spec From a Remote Location

contributed by Mark Lumsden of McMaster University

Connect is a program which allows connection to spec from another terminal providing a mirror of the local terminal running spec. It allows full control and monitoring of spec from any terminal - including a home pc.

Read Mark's documentation.

Download the connect script.

Download the kibitz2 script.

Note, the standard gnu screen utility allows the same functionality. See gnu.org/software/screen for details on that.