2.4 DIRAC v3.4

DIRAC v3.4.5.2

24 February 2023

Changes:

• Autoscrolling in Measure is activated by default.
• Fixed an issue about force Virtual Point Transformation.
• Fixed an issue about moving measurements on active AMS.
• Fixed an issue about empty cells calculation in import campaign.
• Improved project saving error handling.

DIRAC v3.4.4.0

14 December 2022

Changes:

• Adaption to PAK Live 3.6 to handle sampling rate configurations.
• Fixed an issue of saving complex geometries with same name.

DIRAC v3.4.3.0

18 November 2022

Changes:

• A setting was added in Preferences to determine how direction unit vectors are exported to ATFX. This may help avoid incompatibilities when importing DIRAC ATFX exports in 3rd party software, which may not support true unit vectors.

DIRAC v3.4.2.1

2 November 2022

Starred measurements for Automatic Measurement Selection (AMS)

It is now possible to select certain measurements as a base measurement in Measure. This is done by selecting the Star icon in the measurement card. Every other measurement is then compared to this base measurement and the similarity is calculated.

Other changes

• Replacing a sensor in Prepare is now properly undoable.
• It is now easier to input data into List Mode in Prepare.

Bug fixes

• Fixed an issue that occurs when zooming on geometry while placing sensor.
• Fixed an issue where channels name were not displayed in Analyze in an import campaign.
• Fixed an issue where deleting a duplicated geometry would delete both geometries.
• Fixed an issue where moving measurements to another excitation in Measure would not update the new excitation average.
• Other smaller bug fixes.

DIRAC v3.4.1.1

29 September 2022

DIRAC v3.4 comes with significant new features that simplify and assist in the tasks of measurement preparation and measurement execution. Details of these changes, as well as the smaller changes and bug fixes can be found below.

Automatic Measurement Selection (AMS)
DIRAC now has the ability to automatically select and deselect measurements, called Automatic Measurement Selection, or in short AMS. This capability relies on computations of measurement similarity, based on the coherence of every possible pair of measurements within a single excitation point. As a result, AMS will be able to suggest 2 or more measurements that together maximize the coherence on that excitation point. The outcome is subject to a minimum similarity threshold, an optional maximum amount of measurements and a frequency range to focus on.

The AMS controls are found in the Impact Locations card in Measure. At first, the user sees one AMS preset named “AMS”, which is already configured for quick use. The user can choose to add multiple presets to suit their needs, by clicking on the icon to the right of the presets.

AMS is able to be run in three operational states:

1. Current: by single-click on the AMS preset button, it runs on the currently selected excitation.
2. All: by clicking on Run for all in the drop-down menu, it runs on every excitation in the project. Note that this may take a while to compute!
3. Live: by double-clicking on an AMS preset button, it turns that preset into an orange state. This means that AMS will respond to any incoming measurement, and adjust and update the valid/invalid measurements as you go.

The user can configure the settings of an AMS preset by clicking the drop-down menu; all settings are saved in the DIRAC project.

• Name: this defines the name of the preset, which is shown on the button itself.
• Hammer: this sets the preset to affect only measurements made with the defined hammer. By default, AMS operates on every hammer. Note: if high/low/band-pass filtering is active on a hammer (input source), these frequencies are respected as minimum and maximum frequencies for the similarity calculation.
• Frequency: this defines the frequency band in which the similarity is computed. Default value is the entire frequency range as specified in the DAQ wizard step 2.
• Similarity: this is a metric used by the AMS algorithm which defines how similar measurements need to be in order to be considered for selection, after the two best-matching have been selected.
• Amount of excitations: this metric sets the maximum amount of selected measurements per excitation. It can be left empty, in which case it does not impose a maximum amount.

The user has the ability to exclude certain measurements from the AMS calculation by right-clicking on the measurement and selecting Exclude this measurement from AMS.

Add an additional excitation source during measurement
It is now possible for a user to map extra excitation sources mid-measurement. There are two possible scenarios when assigning mid-measurement in the DAQ wizard of DIRAC:

• New excitation sources can only be mapped to channels that have not been in use (or are not in use) yet;
• Response sensors can only be remapped to DAQ channels that have previously been mapped to response sensors, as their data has been recorded from the start of the campaign.

Separate selection for VP response and reference DoF
It is now possible to configure separate DoF types for response and reference for a specific VP, i.e. the rows and columns of a VP FRF matrix, respectively. One may also sync/unsync reference and response DoFs of specific VPs, so they are kept similar. All this can be done in the Virtual Point section of Prepare when in List mode, as well as in the Properties widget of the VP in question in 3D mode.

Force VP calculation
To support Virtual Point measurement campaigns with force gauges, it is now possible to assign Virtual Points to custom sensors such as force sensors. If DIRAC sees that force sensors have been assigned to a VP, it will create VP force response DoFs instead of VP acceleration response DoFs. The VP transformation will be calculated differently for VP force responses, as forces are additive in the meaning of response channels (forces may be added together, accelerations not).

Renewed Virtual Point Transformation card
The VP Quality card has been reworked into a new VP Tansformation card to better highlight information relevant to the design of experiment.

VP conditioning now exists on the left side of the card, showing a list of VPs, along with their corresponding overall condition numbers for both Responses and References (forces). It also gives an overview of the amount of sensors channels / excitation points associated with that VP. Three buttons are available above the table:

• The DoF conditioning view can be expanded to show the condition numbers for Tx, Ty, Tz, Rx, Ry, Rz individually.
• The values of the DoF conditioning matrix may be shown using the icon above. These are values between 0 and 1: 1 represents the absolute best possible conditioning for that VP DoF; any lower value can be understood as relative score between the various DoFs of that VP.
• The view may be refreshed to recompute in case anything changed in the project.

On the right hand side, the contribution matrix is shown for the selected VP. One may toggle between Response and Force using the buttons above. The desired VP may be changed through the drop-down menu in the contribution title.

Modify excitation names using customizable templates
Similar to sensor channels, it is now possible to set excitation naming templates using tokens, such as VirtualPoint, Direction or Index. This is done by either double-clicking on the excitation name, or right-clicking on the excitation name and selecting Set naming template. It is then possible to name excitation by either typing in a new excitation name, or by pressing the { key to open a drop-down menu and selecting the desired variables. A name can be a combination of both tokens, and text.

• Multiple excitation names can be set using the same template by holding down Ctrl or Shift, and right-clicking to select Set naming template.
• Once a template is made, it is also possible to drag the template over other excitation names using the control in the bottom right corner of the selection.
• Excitation templates may be deleted in the same way as they were made.

UFF with Local Coordinate System
When exporting in the UFF format, The UFF file now has coordinate systems defined in the Universal File Format UFF-18. This gives DIRAC the ability to specify the orientation of sensors in their local coordinate system by referencing them directly in that coordinate system.

Other changes

• DIRAC responds significantly faster to any changes that result in refreshing data.
• It is now possible to set the default lower bound of the matrix viewer in Preferences.
• Added the ability to add a 2-DoF sensor to a project, with XY, XZ or YZ channels.
• DIRAC now warns users of low disk space when starting a measurement.
• It is now possible to choose which DoFs you would like to export to Excel XLSX format.
• Added the ability to auto-scroll through measurements in Measure.
• DIRAC can now give sound feedback when measuring.

Bug fixes

• Fixed an issue where too many DAQ devices were displayed after connection loss.
• Fixed an issue where the Matrix view was not updated in Analyze.
• Fixed an issue where the Response and Force Consistency was not refreshed.