[itom-discussions] itom 2.2.0 is released

[Marc G. <mar...@it...>]

The 'itom' team is pleased to announce the next version 2.2.0 of 'itom'.
More than 850 commits have been
pushed into the open source Git repositories since the last version 2.1.0.

The most important changes are:

* A generic snapshot dialog has been added that can be used with any camera
to automatically grab images and
  optionally save them to the hard drive or into a dataObject
* A timer dialog has been added to show and optionally stop all active
timer instances
* Optional stylesheets as well as editor themes have been improved and made
available by the property dialog.
* Many improvements concerning a robust detection of Python installations
including configurations in the property dialog.
* A generic widget *motorAxisController* has been added that can be used to
control any actuator.
* A new built-in help viewer has been added with full rendering
possibilities (supported stylesheets of the
  Qt assistant have been reduced from Qt 5.6 on)
* Plot dataObjects, pointClouds and polygonMeshes from the context menu of
the workspace
* Matlab bindings are directly compiled into itom and try to find the
necessary Matlab libraries at runtime
  (if Matlab is available)
* Better integration of matplotlib figures into the overall figure
management. Renewed matplotlib backend
  for faster rendering.
* Lines of the line plot can now be individually styled (by script as well
as the GUI)
* New shape class added for working with rectangles, ellipses, circles,
lines... Creating such shapes in 1D
  or 2D plots has been improved and it is possible to create mask
dataObjects from a set of shapes.
* Improved color schemes in 1D and 2D plot
* Many improvements in vtk3DVisualizer

Examples of these changes can be found in many demo scripts in the demo
subfolder.

New plugins are:

* FirgelliLac: stepper motor driver from Firgelli (32bit only)
* Roughness: algorithm plugin for line-wise roughness evaluations (Ra, Rq,
Rsk, Rz...)
* CyUSB: usb communication for Cypress USB controllers
* ThorlabsISM: Thorlabs integrated stepper motors (using Thorlabs Kinesis
1.7.0)
* ThorlabsBP: Thorlabs brushless piezo (using Thorlabs Kinesis 1.7.0)

Many camera plugins are now compiled with the up-to-date drivers. See the
changelog
(
http://itom.bitbucket.org/latest/docs/00_releaseNotes/changelog_220.html#plugins)
or the specific plugin documentations for more information.

The Windows setup is now compiled with the following C++ components:

* compiled with Qt 5.6.1-1
* contains OpenCV 3.1.0
* PointCloudLibrary 1.8.0, visualization using VTK 7.0 (OpenGL 1.1)

The all-in-one installer is now shipped with the following Python packages:

* Python 3.5.1
* Pip 8.1.2
* Numpy 1.11.1 + MKL
* Scipy 0.18.0
* six 1.10.0
* pytz 2016.6
* Matplotlib 1.5.2
* Frosted 1.4.1
* PyParsing 2.1.6
* dateutil 2.5.3
* Pies 2.6.7
* cycler 0.10.0
* scikit-image 0.12.3
* decorator 4.0.10
* networkx 1.11
* Pillow 3.3.0
* dask 0.11.1

For the compilation the all-in-one development environment MSVC2013-Qt5.6.1
from
https://sourceforge.net/projects/itom/files/all-in-one-build-setup/ has
been used.

Please uninstall a previous version of itom using the Windows unistall
tool. If you already have Python 3.5
on your computer, you don't need to reinstall Python, however make sure
that Numpy is available in a 1.11.x version.

Python packages can be installed or upgraded using the itom-internal Python
package manager. Most python packages
including their dependencies can therefore automatically be downloaded from
pypi.python.org.

If you want to use big packages with a high amount of C-Code included (like
Numpy, Scipy or Matplotlib) under
Windows, please download the corresponding wheel archives from
http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/ and install
them using the itom internal Python package manager tool.

This version is tagged with 'v2.2.0' in the source repository, the current
setup versions for Windows 32bit and
64bit are available at bitbucket.org/itom/itom/downloads.

A changelog with the most important changes and added features is available
in the current documentation:
http://itom.bitbucket.org/latest/docs/00_releaseNotes/changelog_220.html.

The main project website is:
itom.bitbucket.org

This version of the setup contains all freely available plugins and
designer plugins. A list of available plugins including usage requirements
can be found at http://itom.bitbucket.org/plugins.html.

Feel free to install the new setup or compile the current version from
trunk (Windows or Linux).

If you have any questions, issues or itom related topics, write an email to
this mailing list (itom-discussions@...)
or report bugs at https://bitbucket.org/itom/itom/issues. If you want to
get further information, like release notes...)
please subscript to the mailing list at
https://sourceforge.net/p/itom/mailman/.


Best regards

Marc Gronle
Institut für Technische Optik, University of Stuttgart