baudline
Home
News
What is baudline?
Screenshots
Download
FAQ
Manual
Search
Solutions
Mystery Signal
Contact
color picker

The color picker window has the controls for three user custom color ramps (top to bottom) that can be used in the spectrogram display.  By modifying a series of RGB (red, green, blue) sliders a custom spectrogram color ramp can be created.  In order to display the custom color ramp they first need to be enabled in the input channel mapping window.



The first set of RGB sliders control the color Gain.  The second set of RGB sliders control the color Exponential curve.  Both the gain and the exponential curve parameters are plotted in the black box entitled Plot.  On the far right is the color Ramp which maps spectral dB energies in to spectrogram color intensities.  The uppermost color represents a 0 dB value in the spectrum window, while the lowermost color represents -136 dB.

palette menus
These menus offer control parameters for the further modification of color space.  Various palette functions and shapes can be selected in many unique combinations that result in vibrant and exciting color palette ramps.  To access the palette menus, point the mouse in the Plot or Ramp graphics regions then press and hold the 3rd mouse button.  Each of the three user custom color ramps has its own separate settings.  Some of the palette controls can be cycled through with the Up/Down arrow keys or a scroll wheel mouse.

palette functions
Many functions are available that allow for the rotation, folding, or scaling or the color space.  The functions are fairly self explanatory.  The Gain and Exponential sliders can be reset to their default values.  The gain can be doubled for more dynamic range or for clipping effects.  A fade to black function performs a graceful decent towards darkness at the -136 dB bottom of the spectrum zone.


RGB mapping
The map RGB to menu allows for color rotation cycling.  The RGB curves can be mapped to permutations of RGB (red green blue), CMY (cyan magenta yellow), and mono color spaces.  These mappings are a form of color rotation.  New and interesting color permutations can be auditioned with the Up/Down arrow keys or with the mouse scroll wheel.


palette shapes
A color palette shape is an expression of the RGB color triplets vs. the signal intensity.  It defines the fundamentals of the color palette.  Shapes can range from simple linear lines, parallelograms, circle parts, cosine functions, and zigzag divisions that create a rainbow like palette.  The custom user loadable palettes are also available in this menu.  New and interesting color palette shapes can be auditioned with the Up/Down arrow keys or with the mouse scroll wheel.


An incredible number of color combinations are possible simply by adjusting the controls of this window.  The quickest and easiest way to explore color space is by spinning the mouse scroll wheel in the different active regions of the color picker window.  Each setting has a cascading effect and makes the parameter space very dense.  The following palettes were created by a couple spins of the mouse wheel.




custom user loadable color palettes
This feature allows for an infinite flexibility in the generation of unique color palettes.  Create a text file that consists of at least 2 lines of RGB numeric values and copy it into the ~/.baudline/palettes/ directory or manually load it with the -palette command line option.  The new color palette will now be available in the palette shapes menu.

Custom user loadable color palettes can be created by hand editing a text file, with a spreadsheet, or by a simple bit of code.  For maximum resolution with 24bpp graphics a good file format creation guideline to follow is to have 256 lines that have 3 columns of numeric RGB values that range from 0 - 255 but this is not required.  The number of RGB lines can range from 2 to 3000.  The RGB values can be any decimal integer or floating point number.  The palette loading algorithm is self scaling in that palette files can be very free form.  Lines can be added or deleted and files can be concatenated onto each other.  Pound # comments lines are also allowed.  Baudline's user palette feature was designed to be flexible and robust enough that it can read palette files that have even been created for other visualization programs.

The following picture is an example of some of the palettes included in the baudline.tar.gz package.  The first purple-green blend palette is made by a file that consists of only these two lines:
    3 9 0
    7 0 9
    



 
color aperture
The color aperture window controls the light intensity mapping of the color ramp.  Unlike the color picker window which only controls the parameters of the three user custom color ramps, the color aperture window controls the intensity mapping of all spectrogram colors displayed.  By adjusting the Upper and Lower dB sliders, the range of unique color elements that are used in the spectrogram color ramp can be fine tuned accordingly. 



The effect of focusing the available colors to a smaller region is useful for two reasons.  First, it allows zooming the spectrogram color sensitivity to any specific region, high or low, large or small.  The idea is to see only the section of spectral energy of interest.  Second, since the number of unique colors is finite, focusing the color ramp intensities to a range smaller than the default 136 dB span greatly increases the color resolution (more unique colors per dB).  This is very handy for viewing the small details of weak signals or reducing the gradient granularity of highly averaged signals (see drift integrator).

 
scroll control
This window controls all aspects of scrolling from speed to memory usage to direction.  Baudline uses an infinite wrap-around buffer construct that can record and collect data forever.  Both the overlap and the buffers (MB) control sliders have a direct effect on the max capture time which can be set to utilize all available RAM.  This can be useful for long term monitoring applications where the ability to go back and analyze previously collected sample data is important.


overlap
The overlap slider at the top controls the spectrogram scrolling speed.  Adjusting the overlap slider also has the effect of controlling resolution in the time axis.  The units are an odd "sqrt(%)" which means that the slider value is the square root of the percent of the FFT window that slides by every slice.  That is to say, that moving the slider to the left makes the window overlap smaller, hence allows it to scroll more quickly, while moving the slider to the right makes baudline scroll more slowly.  The range of the sliding overlap is from just 1 sample up to the number of samples that are in the FFT transform size.  The justification for the odd square root units is to make the control non-linear, in order to make the slider more responsive to small changes.  The overlap slider offers a course level of control.

The number to the right and just below the slider widget (1019 in the example image) is the actual slide size in units of samples.  In addition to displaying the slide size value this number also offers a fine level of control.  Point the mouse cursor on the number and then press the Up/Down arrow keys or spin the mouse wheel to adjust by ±1 sample.  Holding down the Alt key while performing the increment action will change the slide size by ±16 samples.  This precise tuning capability is extremely advantageous when aligning the line width of the Raster transforms.

max capture time
This is the maximum amount of time in hours, minutes, seconds (HH:MM:SS) that the circular wrap around buffer can hold, without wrapping and rewriting the data first recorded.  Many things affect this value: the overlap percentage, the amount of buffer space, the number of channels, the color bit depth of the graphics plane, ...

buffers (MB)
This slider represents how much system memory, in megabytes, baudline is allowed to use for its internal buffers.  Memory is important because it determines how deep the circular buffer is while you are recording.  It also determines how much detail baudline can remember for files that are loaded.  This improves scrolling snappiness because the more data that is precalculated, the less data needs to be calculated real-time. 

Note that this value is only a request; if you load a 100 megabyte file and the memory buffer value is set to only 20 megabytes, then baudline will use all of the memory needed to load the file into memory (100 MB), plus the minimum required for its graphical buffers.  If you use more memory than is available then swapping will slow down system performance.

direction
Only the scroll up direction is currently implemented.

Copyright © 2007 SigBlips.com - group - blog - site map