Breakthrough Listen I/O Methods for Python.
Filterbank + Raw file readers
This repository contains Python 2 readers for interacting with Sigproc filterbank (.fil), HDF5 (.h5) and guppi raw (.raw) files generated by the Breakthrough Listen instruments.
Installation
The latest release (1.3.5) can be installed via pip:
pip install blimpy
Or, the latest version of the development code can be installed from the github repo and then run python setup.py install (with sudo if required) or by using the following terminal command:
pip install https://github.com/UCBerkeleySETI/blimpy/tarball/master
You will need numpy, h5py astropy, scipy, and matplotlib as dependencies. A pip install should pull in numpy, h5py, and astropy, but you may still need to install scipy and matplotlib separately.
Note that h5py needs to be installed in this way.
$ pip install --no-binary=h5py h5py
Command line utilities
After installation, some command line utilities will be installed:
watutil, for reading/writing/plotting blimpy filterbank files (either .h5 or .fil format).filutil, for reading/plotting blimpy filterbank files (.fil format).rawutil, for plotting data in guppi raw files.fil2h5, for converting .fil files into .h5 format.h52fil, for converting .h5 files into .fil format.bldice, for dicing a smaller frequency region from (either from/to .h5 or .fil).matchfils, for checking if two .fil files are the same.
Use the -h flag to any of the above command line utilities to display their available arguments.
Reading blimpy filterbank files in .fil or .h5 format
The blimpy.Waterfall provides a Python API for interacting with filterbank data. It supports all BL filterbank data products; see this example Jupyter notebook for an overview.
The Sigproc user guide gives details of the filterbank (.fil) format. This method is the most up-to-date and supercedes the depreciated blimpy.Filterbank which can only import .fil files.
From the python, ipython or jupiter notebook environments.
from blimpy import Waterfall
fb = Waterfall('/path/to/filterbank.fil')
#fb = Waterfall('/path/to/filterbank.h5') #works the same way
fb.info()
data = fb.data
Reading guppi raw files
The Guppi Raw format can be read using the GuppiRaw class from guppi.py:
from blimpy import GuppiRaw
r = GuppiRaw('/path/to/guppirawfile.raw')
header, data = r.read_next_data_block()Note: most users should start analysis with filterbank files, which are smaller in size and have been generated from the guppi raw files.