Hi all
I have some data acquisition files formatted as dac and not daq.
I was not able to convert them in python and seems like matlab also does not support dac.
Does anyone know a way to directly read them in python preferably or any other solution?
What program/hardware did you capture the data with? Additionally, what kind of data is it? Commonly, data acquisition files are just an ordered array of a basic data type (uint32 or the like), and can be read into either matlab or python quite easily once known.
See: https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/fread.html
@Austin Doughty : thank you for your response, could you please explain the data types a bit more?
Farzad Torabi There are several basic data types: integers, unsigned integers, floating point numbers (floats), and characters. There are a couple other possible data types, but those are the only ones ever used in data capturing. To store data in memory, every number has to be digitized into one of those formats with a certain bit-length. As a result, it's common to abbreviate the data types using a short-hand label (like uint, int, or float) and a bit-length (8, 16, 32, etc.). Most commonly, the bit-length is the same as whatever system the data was captured on (although this is not guaranteed; it is possible for computers to create and store data with different bit length).
If the data is stored as a character (least common, easiest to check), then it should be able to be read by any simple text-editing program like Notepad. Ruling that out, it helps to make some guesses about what the data might look like. If the data should contain both negative numbers and decimal values, then the data must be a float of some length. If it does not require decimal values but does require negative numbers, then an integer data type should be used. If the data is simply a series of relative intensities or the like (common with images), then an unsigned integer could be used.
Commonly, only two types of floating point numbers are used: floats and doubles. Floats have a bit-length of 32 bits, and doubles have a bit-length of 64 bits. The exact bit-length of the data can often be determined from the file-size in file types that do not utilize a header (and if they do use a header, then the header often contains the data-length within it). As an example, I once was working with MRI image data stored in a file where I knew the height, width, and number of slices stored in the MRI data. Dividing the file size by the height, width, and number of slices, in turn, left me with the number 4, indicating that my data was stored using a data type that was 4 bytes (32 bits) long.
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