STON

During my second year as Head of RSE in Sheffield I took on a small software project with a researcher in Germany, Evgenia Dammer. The goal of the work was to create a tool that would make her daily work easier.

As a result of this work we created STON, a software that is focused on the visualisation and analysis of thin sections of rock and minerals samples. It is made entirely in Python using PySide6 and fully open source. This makes her job, which was very manual, much more automatic and efficient. In addition, as the analysis and identification of structures is made programatically, it made her work also more reproducible.

We release a first version in 2025 and published it in the Journal of Open Source Software (Thomas & Dammer, 2025). We created a entire documentation website hosted on GitHub, you can find it here.

STON has won the FAIR & Data and Software Award at the University of Sheffield in category Engineering (More info).