GrainSpotter is a software which looks for grains in a 2D diffraction image. It was developed by S. Schmidt, Technical University of Denmark. See the publication for more information:

Søren Schmidt
GrainSpotter: a fast and robust polycrystalline indexing algorithm
J. Appl. Cryst. (2014). 47, 276-284
https://doi.org/10.1107/S1600576713030185

First of all, you will need Linux, either as a separate harddrive (with lots of memory space) or as a virtual machine on your Windows/Apple computer. In case you are not familiar with Linux, ask your administrator for help and maybe do an online crash course to learn basic navigation and so on.

You have basically two options for getting GrainSpotter. One is with the help of Anaconda, or from the source.

First of all, get yourself Anaconda: https://www.anaconda.com/download/#linux

Then go to the Anaconda Cloud with your browser and search the cloud for grainspotter. Then click on Files and download the Linux version. Unpack it to a directory of your choice.

Go back to your browser and click on Conda. There is a short code which is necessary to install GrainSpotter. It should be something like conda install -c fable grainspotter

Copy the code to your Konsole and follow the installation instructions.

The installation requires a C compiler installed in your system.

1. Download the GrainSpotter source code from https://sourceforge.net/p/fable/code/HEAD/tree/GrainSpotter/trunk/,
2. Move into the folder with GrainSpotter and type make,
3. Log-in as administrator (root) and type make install.

It should work out of the box.

To run it, you need a file with the ending .ini. When you perform a simulation with PolyXSim, it should automatically create such a file. For more information on how it should look like click here.

When you think your .ini file should be fine, it is time to “spot grains” (at least this is what the software should do according to its name). For this type the following to the Konsole:

grainspotter 'some_file_name'.ini
or
GrainSpotter.0.90 'some_file_name'.ini

The algorithm produces a .log file, a .spe file and a .gve file.

There is a brief manual online at https://sourceforge.net/p/fable/code/HEAD/tree/GrainSpotter/trunk/doc/.

Otherwise, you should have a look at the following pages

• Grain indexing with GrainSpotter
• In the works: indexing a complex dataset with many phases