2016_09_23 visualization meeting

jjt · September 20, 2016, 9:22pm

Bluejeans: 107541143

Agenda:

Discussion of histograms. See my use case note in the 9/16 meeting minutes
Discuss Xiuquin’s meeting with DM folks.
Visualization “Concept of Operations” document, which was assigned to @jjt and @marshall during the IPAC visit to SLAC (PW protected link). I think that the “Draft Description of User Interaction”, which I posted last February, can be uset as a start.

Notes:

@tony_johnson’s summary of IPAC-SLAC meeting:

New version of Firefly (and documentation) has been installed. See Tony’s notes below.
The control room layout was discussed. In particular, is the camera control room different from the LSST ctl room? The purpose of the ConOps document is to distinguish between Camera-specific interactions and the more generic display interface.
Future changes to Python interface. If data manipulation is needed for each command, a new process is needed, to get the data. To reduce overhead, it might pay to keep an in-memory version of the FITS file. A project for the future.
@gpdf suggested that we add a “back” button to the “display latest” mode, in case an image is superseded before the user is able to pause the diaplay.

@tatianag:

Tatiana showed some examples of the new interface.examples.
When will new features be implemented? Basic functionality exists now. Not sure - one month? few months?
Firefly documentation issue: @tatianag will post an improvement to the github/FF doc. There is a more efficient way to pass properties, which makes step 6 unnecessary.

tony_johnson · September 23, 2016, 3:44pm

I have attached the minutes of the Camera Image Visualization meeting with IPAC here (14.1 KB)

We mainly discussed long-term plans for fetching data from the camera DAQ in an efficient and supportable manner, but some items are directly relevant to this meeting:

The new version of firefly is now installed at SLAC here: http://lsst-camera.slac.stanford.edu/firefly
In particular API documentation is here: http://lsst-camera.slac.stanford.edu/firefly/jsdoc/
Action Item: Con Ops for the display – how/who/when for the camera visualization display Jon Thaler (TBC) Stuart Marshall (The background for this item is to explain what are the differences between the camera specific display at the summit in the camera annex of the control room, and the general image visualization display planned for the main control room)
Future changes to python interface. Plan is to deliver an “in memory” fits file to the python code, cropped to the rectangular region encompassing the selection. The idea is to speed up python operations which require image access, without complicating the python interface too much.
Tatiana will be providing more examples for how to use the new API, in particular the new “channel” mechanism for communicating with firefly (potentially from a different window) and more examples for displaying histograms.
Add “back” button in addition to pause/resume to the image fetching buttons, to allow for the case where the user saw something interesting but hit pause just too late.

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marshall · September 23, 2016, 4:07pm

tatianag · September 23, 2016, 5:02pm

@victor_ren Thank you for putting the adding the build instructions.

As I have mentioned during the meeting, you might want to update your build process, described in https://github.com/lsst-camera-visualization/lsst_firefly, to avoid Step 6 (modifying app.prop for each deployment).

You can place the properties you’d like to override your own .prop file into the ${server_config_dir} directory, as described in “Firefly Configuration”/“Runtime” section of firefly-environment.md