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C-Therm TCi instrument usage and data process

C-Therm TCi instrument usage and data process#

Process data exported from the C-Therm TCi thermal conductivity analyzer. See below for processing data exported from the instrument, or Tutorial to learn how to use the instrument.

Usage#

First install Python 3.11 and pipx. See the quick setup guide for details on Windows machine setup. The c_therm_tci.py script processes the TCi C-Therm instrument’s XML data exports into CSV files. For instance, to process the example data locally, download c_therm_tci.py, data.xml and data.xlsx to your Desktop. Then, right-click on your Desktop, click “Open in Terminal”, and run

py -3.11 -m pipx run c_therm_tci.py

which processes data.xml into data.csv. Now, open data.xlsx, click to enable data connections, then click Refresh all in the Data ribbon twice to refresh the Power Queries and PivotTable. This example data and the Excel workbook illustrates how to process arbitrary data exports from the C-Therm TCi instrument.

Example data#

The example data folder in this repo has data.xml, a simplified representation of the shape of data exported from the C-Therm TCi instrument and data.csv represents the result of processing with c_therm_tci.py.

The data.xlsx workbook ingests and post-processes data.csv. The setup sheet programmatically finds data.csv for Power Query, raw_data shows CSV data, grouped_averages groups and averages results by test run, and results further digests the data. grouped_averages also allows overriding the “validity” of a test result and to provide a comment about each test.

Windows quick setup#

This is the quickest way to get set up on Windows for running this Python script, and for Python scripts in general. Install App Installer (winget). If this fails you may need to go to the Microsoft Store app, click Library, then Get Updates, then Update all, then try installing winget again. Also install Windows Terminal, then open Windows Terminal from the Start menu. Run

winget install --id 'Python.Python.3.11' --override '/quiet PrependPath=0'
py -3.11 -m pip install pipx
py -3.11 -m pipx ensurepath

which will install Python 3.11 and pipx, and configure pipx.

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