v0.5.0 (Major API update)
Overview
This release includes:
- major API updates to provide a more coherent data access pattern
- restructuring of subpackages and classes to allow better maintenance and future expansion
- reorganization of documentation, which also documents the API changes
- overhaul and improvements of CI, including removing the use of Git LFS to store test data
- new features
- bug fixes
API updates
The existing API for converting files from raw instrument formats to a standardized format, and for calibrating data and performing operations such as binned averages and noise removal has been updated.
The new API uses a new EchoData
object to encapsulate all data and metadata related to/parsed from a raw instrument data file. Beyond the calibration of backscatter quantities, other processing functions follow a consistent form to take an xarray Dataset as input argument and returns another xarray Dataset as output.
The major changes include:
- change from an object-oriented method calls to functional calls for file conversion (using the new
convert
subpackage), and deprecate the previousConvert
class for handling file parsing and conversion - deprecate the previous
Process
class, which use object-oriented method calls for performing both calibration and data processing - separate out calibration functions to a new
calibrate
subpackage - separate out noise removal and data reduction functions to a new
preprocess
subpackage - create a new
EchoData
object class that encapsulates all raw data and metadata from instrument data files, regardless of whether the data is being parsed directly from the raw binary instrument files (returned by the new functionopen_raw
) or being read from an already converted file (returned by the new functionopen_converted
)
See documentation for detailed usage of the new API.
Subpackage and class restructuring
The subpackages and classes were restructured to improve modularity that will help will future expansion and maintenance. The major restructuring includes:
("SONAR" below is used to indicate the sonar model, such as EK60, EK80 or AZFP)
- consolidate overlapping EK60/EK80 components, deprecate the previous
Convert
classes that handled file parsing and serialization, and revise newParseSONAR
andSetGroupsSONAR
classes for file parsing and serialization - consolidate all calibration-related components to a new
calibrate
submodule, which usesCalibrateSONAR
classes under the hood - consolidate all preprocessing functions into a a new
preprocess
submodule, which will be later expanded to include other functions with similar use in a workflow
CI overhaul and improvements
- Added github workflows for testing, building test docker images, and publishing directly to PyPI
- Deprecated usage of Travis CI
- Test run is now selective on Github, to run tests only on changed/added files. Or run all locally with
run-test.py
script. (#280, #302)
Documentation reorganization and updates
- Re-organization of pages with better grouping
- Added
What's New
page - Added
Contributing to echopype
page - Overhaul
API reference
page
New features
- Add interfacing capability to read from and write to cloud object storage directly. (#216, #240)
- Add support to convert
.ad2cp
files generated by Nortek's Signature series ADCP (#326) - Allow environmental and calibration parameters to be optionally used in calibration in place of the values stored in data file
- Mean volume backscattering strength (MVBS) can now be computed based on actual time interval (specified in seconds) and range (specified in meters) (#54)
- Add NMEA message type as a data variable in the
Platform
group (#232), which allows users to freely select the suitable ones depending on use
Bug fixes
- Fix EK80 config XML parsing problem for files containing either
PulseDuration
orPulseLength
(#305) - Fix time encoding discrepancy in AZFP conversion (#328)
- Fix problematic automatic encoding of AZFP frequency (previously as
int
) tofloat64
(#309) - Overhaul EK80 pulse compressed calibration (current implementation remaining in beta, see #308)