I apologise for my low activity in the last few weeks. Those of you who are following my Twats (Twitter messages) will probably be able to link this to our newborn baby. Now growing strongly for two weeks, having to wake up every four hours in what seems like the longest beamtime ever have left me feeling like a pinball at night.
Despite that, the research continues, and I am happy to say that getting the Perfect measurement (or an approximation thereof at least, as described in the document of a few posts ago) will become maybe a little easier with some new software I wrote. The software draft is written in Matlab, but I am trying to learn Python to recode the essentials in free software (interested in helping? Let me know!).
Why all this focus on the perfect measurement, you may ask? Well, it turns out that for most of the SAXS analyses to give you the correct answer (as opposed to just an answer), your data should be correct to within 1%. Most beamlines will not give you this accuracy out of the box (and some beamlines have more problems that will come to light if you run a standard sample), and thus advanced data correction is necessary.
This software will, after entering the right information, do most of the corrections necessary to get good data. This means background subtraction, corrections for flatfield, distortion, spherical correction, polarisation and darkcurrent corrections, and corrections for variables such as incoming flux, transmission and scaling to absolute intensity. Furthermore, it will do error calculation and propagation and integration/binning of the data. The end result is ascii file with columns for q, I and error in I, ready for fitting in one of the existing software packages. For anisotropic patterns, a 2D binning method will be implemented shortly, until then the corrected images can be used.
So that was just to wet your appetite, more in the near future after more testing and debugging. Bye!
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