ASCII Header In Logfile

[natronics]

Thinking long term, we probably should know what version of this package generated a logfile. In particular the way to encode/decode types has already changed a couple of times since we have had bugs in the firmware for sensors and argued about units etc. For example, the current master branch will fail at decoding the first drop tower data, but not the second (we changed a message header definition between the two).

We might also want comments like local time for file creation (I know it's in the filename, but it might not always be) or just regular comments like "launch 11", or "droptower test 5, didn't go so well".

There is precedent, like EXIF data in JPEG, but my favorite is the scientific FITS image format, which is very old and since it was "expensive" to load an image 1981 it includes a user definable ASCII metadata, literally designed so you could run head -c 80 random-image.fits and figure out what the image might be before waiting an hour to load it.

It would be great if 8 years from now we could grab a logfile from 2015 and, without any special knowledge (e.g., remembering the quirks from that launch) still be able to unpack it.

[natronics]

Also, what about HDF5 and the like?

[andrewgreenberg]

APDM uses HDF5 and tends to like it. For reference, you should drop Sean an email and see what he says about it.