Python program to convert Campbell Scientific TOB files to ASCII (TOA5) files.

This tool is inspired by the identically-named camp2ascii written by Mathias Bavay: https://git.wsl.ch/bavay/camp2ascii

Installation

You can install camp2ascii using pip:

pip install "camp2ascii[progress]"

or, to install without the progress bar dependency:

pip install camp2ascii

Usage

camp2ascii can be used as a command line tool or as a python module.

The following command calls the CLI:

camp2ascii -i ./64293_20Hz*.dat -odir ./ascii_files -pbar

This will attempt to convert all files matching the glob string ./64293_Metdata*.dat from TOB (binary) format to TOA5 (ASCII) format, outputting the resulting files to the ./ascii_files directory. A progress bar will be displayed.

To use the python API:

import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
# if you installed without pip
# import sys
# sys.path.append("/path/to/working/directory/")
from camp2ascii import camp2ascii, toa5_to_pandas
from pathlib import Path
# convert to ascii as before
out_files = camp2ascii("./64293_20Hz*.dat", "./ascii_files", pbar=True)
# read in data using pandas, summarize to 30 minute averages, and plot sonic temperature
data = pd.concat([
    (
        toa5_to_pandas(path)
        .resample("5min")
        .mean()
    )
    for path in out_files
])
data = data.sort_index()
data.plot(y="sonic_temp", style='o')

plt.show()

The above code snipped uses toa5_to_pandas, but you can also do pd.read_csv(path, skiprows=[0, 2, 3], na_values=["NAN"], parse_dates=["TIMESTAMP"], index_col="TIMESTAMP"). However, since integers in python cannot be NAN (but can in TOA5 files) and due to how NANs are stored in TOA5 files (as "NAN", in quotes), pandas has trouble correctly identifying certain datatypes. toa5_to_pandas will generally work better for this purpose.