`data_logger` provides tools for simple data management.

The module provides classes for saving and loading data for consistent
communication between independent packages for data aquisition and
processing.  This enables loosely coupled experiment control and
analysis software to still function cleanly and reliably.

General data is pickled using `cPickle`, and there are specialized
methods for saving data in the form of binary strings or dicts of
numpy arrays.

`data_logger` is basically a really wimpy version of h5py_.  USE h5py
INSTEAD!

.. _h5py: http://code.google.com/p/h5py/

Installation
============

`data_logger` uses `distutils` for easy installation.  See the
`Hitchhiker's Guide to Packaging`_ for details.  An easy tool based on
distutils is pip_.

.. _Hitchhiker's Guide to Packaging: http://guide.python-distribute.org/
.. _pip: http://pip.openplans.org/


Debian
------

On Debian-esque systems, the installation procedure should be::

  # apt-get intall python-pip
  # pip install -f http://www.physics.drexel.edu/~wking/code/python/ data_logger

Gentoo
------

`pip` isn't in the Portage tree at the moment (`Gentoo bug 317791`_),
so either install it with `easy_install`::

  # emerge -av dev-python/setuptools
  # easy_install pip
  # pip install -f http://www.physics.drexel.edu/~wking/code/python/ data_logger

or use the sunrise_ overlay::

  # emerge -av app-portage/layman dev-vcs/subversion
  # layman --add sunrise
  # emerge -av dev-python/pip
  # pip install -f http://www.physics.drexel.edu/~wking/code/python/ data_logger

.. _Gentoo bug 317791: http://bugs.gentoo.org/317791
.. _sunrise: http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/sunrise


Usage
=====

See the tests in `data_logger.py` for simple examples.


Licence
=======

This project is distributed under the General Public License (GPL)
version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.  See
the COPYING file distributed with the code for details.


Author
======

W. Trevor King
wking@drexel.edu
Copyright 2008-2010