DAWN has been a software package with a rocky start (at the break of dawn). The software is designed for handling Diamond’s NeXus data, and was a bit shit in the beginning according to the Diamond users I know. Now, though, with the continued efforts of a large team and a plan, it is shaping up to be quite remarkable indeed. So remarkable, that even I am starting to see the light…
The latest version (released last week) reads in NeXus files, and allows the viewing, slicing and dicing of the recorded images in a variety of ways. Processing pipelines can be set up to correct the recorded images to some degree, and automation and parallel processing is key. Dawn has recently got some competition with Mantid: a younger piece of software written in Python and intended primarily for neutron experiments. It will be interesting to see the developments of both, but my closer association with Diamond leads me to focus on the former for now. Also, Dawn supports jython and python, so I’m happy…
Dawn’s interface is based on the Eclipse framework and appears a bit cluttered (the icons are very much non-intuitive). It takes a moment to get the hang of the operation, in particular since the icons are small and not so descriptive. After working through some of the tutorials, however, it is dawning on me how to use it, and I can get some basic reduction going. To apply this to my own lab data, however, I need to convert our data to NeXus first.
I’m already bothering people about updating some of the features, in the hope that we can eventually implement the full modular data correction suite. I’ll be trying to extend the use of it for data reduction in our laboratory as well, for which I need these corrections to be in place. On the other hand, having the data corrections available in a relatively slick interface will also further the good cause of omnipresent proper data corrections. I’ve also been informed that the next release will have an NXcanSAS exporter integrated in it, so there’s another nice feature to convince you to move towards the light. Many thanks to Jacob Filik and Tim Snow for the SAXS-pointed developments. Many apologies for the horrible puns, they just had to be dawn.
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