IMPORTANT NOTE: The latest version of the IO Rodeo open hardware colorimeter is the Open Colorimeter. The Open Colorimeter is actively supported. We recommend you visit https://blog.iorodeo.com/open-colorimeter/ for more up-to-date information. This documentation site is for the archived Educational Colorimeter Kit. While we no longer support this version, we wanted to keep this documentation site available for anyone that is still interested in the project. If you have any questions, please email us at info@iorodeo.com.
As Linux distributions tend to have excellent package managers, it is particularly easy to install all of the required packages on Linux. For this reason, for Linux users, we recommend installing the colorimeter software from source. The latest stable version of the source package can be downloaded from here and the development version can be found in the colorimeter project's mercurial repository here https://github.com/iorodeo/colorimeter
The following packages are required by the colorimeter software:
pySerial http://pyserial.sourceforge.net/
PyQt5 http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/software/pyqt/download/
numpy http://numpy.scipy.org/
matplotlib http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/
PyYaml http://pyyaml.org/
The required packages are typically available through your linux distribution's package manager. For example, on ubuntu, they can be installed using the following command
sudo apt-get install python3-serial python3-qt5 python3-numpy python3-matplotlib python3-yaml
While it isn't required we recommend installing the colorimeter software into a python virtual environment to avoid any possible conflict with your system's package manager. The python virtualenv (https://virtualenv.pypa.io/en/latest/) and virtrualenvwrapper (https://virtualenvwrapper.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) utilities are useful tools for easily managing virtual environments. These utilities can be installed using pip or via your system package manager. For example on ubuntu you can use the following command to install virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper for python3
sudo apt-get install python3-virtualenv virtualenvwrapper
After installation you will need to close and re-open your shell in order for the utilities provided by virtrualenvwrapper to be available.
A new virtual enviroment named, colorenv, can be created via the command
mkvirtualenv --system-site-packages -p /usr/bin/python3 colorenv
To activate the 'colorenv' virtual environment you can run the following command
workon colorenv
When the 'colorenv' environment is active your shell prompt should change so that is it preceded by (colorenv).
To deactivate the 'colorenv' virtual environment you can run the following command
deactivate colorenv
To install the colorimeter software into the colorenv virtual environment we first need to activate the virtual environment (using workon as shown above). Next, keeping the virtual environment active, cd to the top level directory of the colorimeter python package (the one containing the setup.py file). Install the package using the following command
python setup.py install
After installation the colorimeter software can be started, from within the virtual environment, via the command colorimeter-main. In addition, within the virtual environment, the colorimeter python module containing the serial library for communicating with the colorimeter device will be available for use in your own programs.