Getting Started

Author          : Hrishikesh Shetgaokar
Guide           : Prof. Avinash Deshpande
Collaborators   : Akhil Jaini, Pavan Uttarkar, Yash Bhusare

This repository is being developed to help undergrad students participating in SWAN get familiarised with radio data processing techniques.

Feel free to reach out to hrishikesh036@gmail.com

Table of Contents

1. Python Installation
2. pip
3. Jupyter Notebook Installation
4. Google Colab

1. Python Installation

1. First check if python is already installed. In your terminal (command prompt), type python --version and python3 --version. If python is installed, it’ll show the version. If not installed, then you’ll get an error saying “command not found”. For our sessions, we'll be using python3.

Figure 1.1: Checking if python is installed

2. If you don't have python installed, you’ll get everything you need to know:
   https://www.python.org/downloads/
   

• For macOs and Windows, the installation is pretty simple. You just download the installer and run through the steps.
  
• For Ubuntu(16.10 or newer), you can follow the steps mentioned in this post:
  https://docs.python-guide.org/starting/install3/linux/.
  
• If you are using any other OS or facing some issue, feel free to reach out.

2. pip

1. pip is a package manager used for python. It simplifies the task of installing packages like numpy, astropy, etc. When you have installed python, you should also get pip. To check if you have pip, just run pip --version or pip3 --version in the terminal.

Figure 2.1: Checking if pip is installed

2. If this gives an error, go to the directory where python is installed. Then go to bin directory there. A sample path to one such bin directory can be: "/usr/local/opt/python@3.8/bin". Check if there is a file named pip or pip3. If yes, you'll need to set PATH environment variable.

3. If you don’t have pip, some resources for installation:
   https://stackoverflow.com/a/12476379
   https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/how-to-install-pip-on-windows/
   https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/installation/

3. Jupyter Notebook Installation

1. Once you have pip, you can now easily install jupyter notebook. Just run pip install notebook. More info here:
   https://jupyter.org/install.html
   
2. To run the notebook, go to the directory where you want to start a project and run the following command on the terminal (or command prompt): jupyter notebook. On successfull startup, you'll see the following:

Figure 2.1: Jupyter Notebook startup logs seen in terminal

Figure 2.2: Jupyter Notebook startup page

Once you see the Jupyter notebook startup page, just browse to the project file location and open the project.

Figure 2.3: Jupyter project

You are ready to go... Start exploring!

4. Google Colab

You can also open the python notebooks on Google Colab:

Figure 3.1: Google Colab Setup

1. Visit Google Colab: https://colab.research.google.com/
2. File → Open Notebook → GitHub
3. Enter GitHub url: https://github.com/hrshe/swan-processing-sessions and click on search icon()
4. In Repository, select hrshe/swan-processing-sessions. Select main branch.
5. session-0/introduction.ipynb will now be listed. Open the project by clicking on it. You can now edit and run the cells! You might also want to add the notebook to your Google Drive.

Figure 3.3: Google Colab Notebook

6. In our excercises, we'll be using some data files. For example, in Sec. 4.4 of session-0/introduction.ipynb, you'll need simulated_pulse.image data file. First download these data files from GitHub repository.

Figure 3.3: Google Colab Upload File

7. In your Google Colab, click on the folder icon(). Then click on file upload icon (), browse to the files on your local machine and upload. Check whether the path where the file is uploaded matches the path given in the code. You are then ready to play around with the uploaded data!!

You can find read-only pdf and html versions of the Jupyter Notebook in other_formats folder as well!