This command line tool extracts spike information from binary spike raster files and converts them in the more digestible ras format. Binary files provide a significant simulation speed advantage over the old ras file format and allow random access to spike information. aube is capable of efficiently merging multiple spk files and export select temporal ranges from it to the more digestible ras format. It can be efficiently incorporated into Linux command-line and pipe based work flow and works flawlessly with gnuplot. The tool included with Auryn releases (ver. >0.6.1) and can be found in the tools directory.

aube is compiled automatically with the rest of Auryn and located in the tools directory. It can be installed to your systems default install location (e.g. /usr/local/bin) with the help of make install. Otherwise you will have to ensure yourself that aube is in the PATH for the following examples to work.

Suppose you have the spk file /tmp/coba.0.e.spk and want to extract all spikes from it and write them to stdout. All you need to do is to call:

aube --input /tmp/coba.0.e.spk

Note, you find an example program generating binary spike output at examples/sim_coba_binmon.cpp.

Suppose you ran your simulation in parallel (you end up with multiple files /tmp/coba.*.e.spk) and you would like to merge these files and then write spikes from 7s to 10s to a file output.ras. The aube call for you is:

aube --inputs /tmp/coba.*.e.spk --from 7 --to 10 --output output.ras

You can use aube in pipes which for instance allows you calling it from without gnuplot. To plot the last 1s of spikes from a simulation from within gnuplot run:

plot '< aube --inputs /tmp/coba.*.e.spk --last 1' with dots