Transforms TDMS data from the CDME's Metal 3D Printers to a more readable file format. This is part of the Ohio State University Center for Design and Manufacturing Excellence Additive Manufacturing lab efforts.

The original problem: The TDMS file outputs from the metal 3d printers here at the lab come with the following hierarchy:

• A build is made of hundreds to thousands of slices, all printed onto the same build plate. Each slice has a TDMS file.
• Each slice of the build has dozens of parts on it, that all occur at the same height on the Y axis.
• Each part has some associated data inside of a TDMS file. All parts are contained in 1 file.

This is pretty understandable at a conceptual level but not very easy to machine read in for visualization purposes. For one, we can't easily grab multiple layers from one part; instead, we have to grab many parts. I'm going ahead and separating these manually.

For visualization purposes, we would prefer to have:

A build will be made of dozens of parts Each part is made of hundreds to thousands of slices Each slice has some associated data located inside a file.

This script transforms the file arrangement to be in a folder hierarchy with HDF5 storage.

The repository linked contains a src folder and a README. Download the src folder or clone the repository to your local machine to use it.

Software prerequisites: Python interpreter & IDLE: https://www.python.org/downloads/ Make sure to install Pip. All of the project was written with Python 3.8 in mind, but the most recent Python 3 version should work. Anaconda also will work well for this.

After installing Pip: open your command line (On windows, run cmd.exe. On Linux, you should know how to do that.) Run the following to install some python libraries (h5py, numpy, nptdms):

pip install -r requirements.txt

These three libraries are required. If these don’t work because you don’t have admin permissions, install locally by appending the --user flag to the commands.

Ok, so I’ve got Python downloaded, the three libraries installed. What now?

Locate the folder of tdms files you want to transform. If they’re in a zip folder, extract them out of the archive.

Run the "tdms2h5.py” file in the root folder by right clicking & selecting “Run with IDLE”. Alternatively, start a command line, navigate to the folder with main.py, and run it in python with the commands python then Main.py.

This module can also be installed locally via pip which will create a command line program "tdms2h5" that can be run from your chosen Python environment.

[user] $ conda activate [virtual env name]
[user] $ conda install h5py numpy nptdms
[user@host] $ python tdms2h5.py -v -a 19 -i 14 -l 11 "/Users/Shared/Data/tdms_data/QMMeltPool_Data/Test_Files/" "/tmp/Converted/" Slice00