noisetone

noisetone is a diagnostic tool that repeatedly reads out a small area from an attached CCD and interprets noise statistics as an audible tone. This is intended to assist diagnosing system noise performance without needing to repeatedly look at a screen whether a change to grounding, etc. made a change to readout noise.

Invoked with no options, noisetone displays a basic summary of the available options:

% noisetone
STARGRASP Noise tool v0.10

usage: noisetone [options]
where [options] can be (default values shown in [])
 c*ontroller=   Hostname or IP of controller
        d*ev=   [0] Device to read out (0 or 1)
       l*eft=   [1] Device channel for left audio (0..7)
      r*ight=   [0] Device channel for right audio (0..7)
    cell*row=   [7] Device cell row read out (0..7, OTA only)
(Do not type the *.  Letters after the * are optional.)

Note: if the controller string is 'test.tone', noisetone
will not attempt to connect to a controller and will
instead generate a test tone. This is intended to make
troubleshooting on a new system easier.

The options are as follows:

option	Description	Reqd?
controller	Hostname or IP address of controller for readout	Y
dev	Controller device to be read out (0 or 1)	N
left	A/D channel for device to be read out and played on the left audio channel (0-7).	N
right	A/D channel for device to be read out and played on the right audio channel (0-7).	N
cellrow	For a connected OTA CCD, cell row to be read out (0-7)	N

Note that if the controller is the special string "test.tone", noisetone will not contact a controller but instead will play a test tone until interrupted. This is intended to allow troubleshooting of noisetone's operation on a new system.

Sound Library

noisetone uses the open-source portaudio library to provide audio functionality. This has been tested on Ubuntu 10.04 as well as an older version of OS X (power PC).

On Ubuntu, portaudio requires the libasound2-dev package to be installed.