Graphical Interface

For most functionality, it's just as easy to use a serial terminal and type commands directly. The one task which is best done through the graphical interface is setting the clock. Through the GUI the hardware clock can be set with a precision in the neighborhood of 10ms, and will similarly report the difference between the PC clock and the freebird clock. The freebird clock is accurate to better than 0.5s/day, and one of the biggest challenges in postprocessing is aligning CTD and freebird conductivity signals.

A secondary task which can only be done through a GUI is the compass calibration. If you don't need compass or IMU data, this can be skipped entirely.

The GUI is written in python, and requires the following libraries:

• pyserial
• wx (soon to use the builtin Tk library)
• numpy
• scipy
• matplotlib
• netCDF4

The easiest approach for installation is most likely the Anaconda python distribution.