A modern, open multichannel-analyzer (MCA) emulator and gamma-spectroscopy workbench, written in Rust. It does what ORTEC's MAESTRO does - acquire, display, calibrate, mark regions, search for peaks, report and automate - with a desktop application, a command-line tool and libraries you can build on.
More screenshots: Conductor, tiled windows, the InSight oscilloscope, the Paper theme
mantaray/
├── crates/mantaray-core spectrum model, calibration, peak analysis, libraries
├── crates/mantaray-formats .Chn .Spc .Spe .Roi .Lib .Clb ASCII JSON list-mode codecs
├── crates/mantaray-device instrument abstraction, presets, detector simulator
├── crates/mantaray-mcb the bridge to real ORTEC hardware: ORTEC's driver on
│ Windows, plain libusb everywhere else
├── crates/mantaray-jobs MAESTRO-compatible .JOB automation
├── crates/mantaray-report ROI reports, nuclide reports, printouts
├── crates/mantaray-cli the `mantaray` command-line workbench
└── crates/mantaray-gui the desktop application
Acquisition. Detectors are driven through one interface, so the built-in
physics simulator, a network instrument (an MCB served over TCP) and real ORTEC
hardware over USB - served over a pipe by the mantaray-mcb bridge, speaking
the same SET_/SHOW_ dialect - behave the same: start, stop, clear, copy to
buffer, list mode, zero-dead-time modes, amplifier/ADC/bias/stabiliser settings
and presets on real time, live time, ROI peak, ROI integral, counting
uncertainty and minimum detectable activity - plus field-mode spectrum storage,
the automatic Optimize and pole-zero routines, and the InSight virtual
oscilloscope.
Display. Two views per spectrum as MAESTRO has them - an expanded view and an inset full view showing where you are - with a marker, rubber-band selection, logarithmic, linear and automatic vertical scaling, baseline zoom, region colouring, library-line markers and a comparison trace.
Spectra are arranged in tabs by default, one filling the working area, and any of them can be pulled out into a window when two need to be watched at once. Workspaces decide what the sidebar shows for the job in hand: Acquisition puts the clock, the dead time and the preset that will stop the run in front of you; Analysis puts the regions and the nuclide lookup there instead.
Look. A colour scheme is not only a palette - it carries how the program draws: tabs or windows, words or icons on the toolbar, the fill under the trace, gridlines, the background wash, the glow, shadows and corner rounding. Seven schemes ship, including one measured from the software these instruments have traditionally been driven with. Every colour is editable, the contrast of each against the plot is reported as you edit, and a scheme is saved as a small JSON file you can send somebody. See docs/themes.md.
Naming a nuclide. Type Cs-137, 137Cs, cs137 or Cs 137 into the
sidebar and its lines are drawn over the spectrum, each labelled with its
emission probability, above an intensity cutoff you choose. When it is not
found, the reason says which kind of not-found it is: no library loaded, not in
this library, or not a nuclide name.
Analysis. Peak information (gross, adjusted gross, background, net and its uncertainty, centroid, FWHM, FW(1/x)M), a multi-scale Mariscotti peak search, five-point binomial smoothing, spectrum stripping, energy and peak-shape calibration, nuclide identification against an editable library, efficiency calibration, activities with decay correction, detection limits, and quality-assurance control charts.
Automation. .JOB files run with MAESTRO's command set, variables and loop
counters, either from the desktop application (a few commands per frame, so the
display keeps up) or headless from the command line.
Undo. Every command that changes or discards data - Clear, Smooth, Strip, region edits, peak marking - can be taken back with Ctrl+Z. Instrument memory is never written back to: undoing a detector command recovers the data into a buffer window, exactly as recalling a file does.
Built archives for Linux, Windows and macOS (Apple silicon) are
attached to each release,
together with a SHA256SUMS.txt covering them. Check a download against what
the release workflow actually built:
sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS.txt # Linux and macOSGet-FileHash MantaRay-windows-x86_64.zip -Algorithm SHA256 # WindowsEach archive holds the desktop application, the mantaray command-line tool and
the mantaray-mcb helper that reaches instruments. Keep the three together: the
application looks for the helper beside itself.
The macOS build is unsigned, so the first run needs the quarantine flag removed
from the extracted binaries - xattr -d com.apple.quarantine mantaray-gui mantaray mantaray-mcb - or a right-click Open. Intel macs are not built:
nothing has run there.
Rust 1.92 or newer.
cargo run -p mantaray-gui # the desktop application
cargo run -p mantaray-gui -- spectrum.Spe # open a file, or run a .JOB
cargo run -p mantaray-cli -- --help # the command-line workbench
cargo run -p mantaray-cli -- serve # a simulator as a network MCB
cargo test # the whole test suiteThe desktop application needs the usual windowing and GL libraries. On Ubuntu or Debian:
sudo apt install build-essential pkg-config libgtk-3-dev \
libxkbcommon-dev libwayland-dev libxcb1-dev libx11-dev libgl1-mesa-devlibgtk-3-dev is only needed for native file dialogs. Without it, build with
cargo run -p mantaray-gui --no-default-featuresand use File / Open path... to type a path instead. The libraries and the command-line tool have no system dependencies at all.
To drive a local ORTEC instrument over USB, build the helper that sits beside
the application - cargo build -p mantaray-mcb - and grant the adapter to your
user once:
echo 'SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="0a2d", ATTR{idProduct}=="0016", TAG+="uaccess", MODE="0660"' \
| sudo tee /etc/udev/rules.d/70-ortec-dpm-usb.rules
sudo udevadm control --reload-rules && sudo udevadm triggerthen replug the adapter and press Scan on the opening screen. No driver is needed; see docs/ortec-hardware.md.
cargo run -p mantaray-gui is enough; no extra packages.
mantaray info spectrum.Spe # what is in a file
mantaray convert in.Spe out.chn # between any supported formats
mantaray peaks spectrum.Spe --sensitivity 2 # find and identify peaks
mantaray report spectrum.Spe --column # MAESTRO-style ROI report
mantaray analyse soil.Spe --efficiency 0.05 \
--quantity 1.2 --unit kg --mda # activities and detection limits
mantaray calibrate raw.chn --point 1788=661.657 --point 3646=1332.492 -o cal.chn
mantaray calibrate raw.Spe --auto Eu-152 -o cal.Spe # find, match and fit automatically
mantaray print spectrum.Spe --from 600 --to 700 # channel dump, seven to a line
mantaray job nightly.job --trace # run an automation script
mantaray job nightly.job --detector 192.168.0.40:2000 # run against an instrument| Format | Read | Write | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
.Chn |
yes | yes | ORTEC integer binary, including the calibration trailer |
.Spc |
yes | yes | ORTEC binary; the record map is followed from the header pointers |
.Spe |
yes | yes | IAEA/CTBTO ASCII, with $ROI, $MCA_CAL and $SHAPE_CAL |
.Roi |
yes | yes | region tables |
.txt, .asc |
yes | yes | ASCII dumps, with TRANSLT's column options |
.json |
yes | yes | MantaRay's own lossless format |
.Lis |
yes | yes | list-mode events, with time slicing |
.n42 |
yes | - | ANSI N42.42 XML, both the 2005 and 2011 revisions |
.csv |
- | yes | channels or analysis results, for spreadsheets |
.Lib |
yes | - | ORTEC binary nuclide libraries, as GammaVision writes them; libraries also read and write as JSON and CSV |
.Clb |
yes | - | GammaVision energy calibrations, recalled by jobs and the application |
See docs/formats.md for the layouts, including how the .Spc
record map was verified.
| builds | tests | hardware | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Linux | yes | yes | yes - USB over libusb, with no vendor driver at all |
| Windows | yes | yes | yes - USB, with only ORTEC's kernel driver |
| macOS | yes | yes | yes - USB over libusb, same road as Linux (Apple silicon) |
All three are released. Each platform earned its release the same way: by driving a real instrument first - macOS was held back until that happened, on 2026-08-07. Intel macs are still not built, for the same reason macOS once was not: nothing has run there, and an untested binary for a platform nobody has used is a promise this project will not make.
A few suites are about Windows itself - file-type registration, the crash report, the bridge to ORTEC's library - and are skipped elsewhere.
- docs/maestro-parity.md - every feature in the MAESTRO manual, where it lives here, and what is deliberately different
- docs/formats.md - file format details
- docs/ortec-hardware.md - driving real ORTEC instruments over USB: the wire dialect, the bench records, and what is verified against hardware as opposed to assumed
- docs/architecture.md - how the crates fit together
- docs/nuclide-data.md - why no nuclide library ships, and how to bring or build one
- docs/themes.md - the rules a palette has to satisfy, the scheme file, workspaces, and where Conductor's colours were measured from
- docs/testing.md - what each test suite holds to account, and what the tests cannot cover
Nuclear data. No nuclide library ships with this project, deliberately: line
energies and emission probabilities belong to whoever evaluated them, and a
table with no evaluation, no date and nothing to cite is worse than no table at
all, because a result computed from it cannot be defended. Bring a .Lib file,
or build a library from an evaluated export with mantaray library - see
docs/nuclide-data.md. Those sources, and the people who
make them reachable:
- the National Nuclear Data Center at Brookhaven National Laboratory, for NuDat and the ENSDF evaluations underneath it;
- the IAEA Nuclear Data Services, whose Live Chart of Nuclides API serves the same evaluations in machine-readable form;
- carsus, from the TARDIS project, which retrieves and caches the NNDC tables;
- Dani Solakian and the Berkeley
RadWatch
spectral-analysisproject, whose compiled NNDC gamma database MantaRay's library builder is designed around, used here with permission.
Standing on. egui and eframe for the interface, nusb for USB without a vendor driver, and the Rust project for the rest.
PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0. Fork it, change it, build on it and share it however you like for any noncommercial purpose - your own use, study, research, teaching, hobby work. Charities, schools, universities, public research bodies and government institutions count as noncommercial too, however they are funded. What the licence does not grant is the right to sell it or use it commercially; for that, ask.
Note that this is a source-available licence, not an OSI-approved open-source one, precisely because it withholds commercial use.
MantaRay is an independent implementation. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or derived from the source code of ORTEC or AMETEK, and MAESTRO is their trademark. Behaviour was reproduced from the published user manual and from public file-format descriptions.
The initial version of MantaRay was vibe-coded: written largely by a large language model working from the MAESTRO manual, under human direction, rather than typed line by line. That is stated plainly because it should change how you read the code and how much you trust it before checking it yourself.
What this means is the ordinary caution owed to any young instrument program: this is alpha software, it has not had a long shakedown across many machines and detectors, and nobody should stake a measurement that matters on it without checking the result against something already trusted. Bug reports are welcome, and so is a careful reading of the parts you intend to rely on.