Add one-click “Preview Raw/Calibrated Spectra” buttons to GUI after data save

[tanmay-starslab]

Motivation

Many first time CHART users, particularly those running observations on a Raspberry Pi, need a quick way to verify data quality before transferring it for further analysis. Currently, this requires launching Jupyter Notebooks or standalone scripts. Adding a quick-look capability within the GUI will make this process more user-friendly.

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Proposed Feature

Add two new buttons in the GUI:

• Preview Raw: Plots uncalibrated spectra exactly as collected from the SDR.
• Preview Calibrated: Shows spectra after applying simple bandpass and gain corrections.

This will enable users to visualize the collected data directly from the GUI immediately after saving. (It could also be extended to support dynamic updates.)

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Implementation Overview

Both buttons will reuse the existing chart.analysis.read_run() function to load and parse the data.
A new backend module, daq/quicklook.py, can be added to handle the plotting and processing logic.

Buttons will remain disabled during data collection and will automatically enable once the run is complete or instead the user can specify a directory path from previous runs. (This feature could also be made dynamic.)

Example Structure:

CHART/
 ├── daq/
 │    ├── chart-observe.py      ← update main GUI controller
 │    └── quicklook.py          ← new backend for quick-look plotting
 └── analysis/
      └── ... (existing analysis and utilities)

[adampbeardsley]

Thanks for the suggestion @tanmay-starslab ! I think it's a great idea, and will definitely help the usability. In case you (or anyone else) plans to implement it, just keep in mind @Maxman0001 is working on a GUI revamp. So we'll just want to coordinate the front end with that branch.

[tanmay-starslab]

Sounds good. I was thinking of implementing this. I can start by adding the backend (quicklook.py) and a minimal integration into the existing GUI on my branch. Once the GUI revamp branch is ready, we can coordinate to merge or adapt it there so it stays consistent.