Tools for z-Tree

• labcontrol - an interface to control z-Tree and z-Leaf
• How to use z-Tree with GNU Linux
• z-Tree and the statistical software R

labcontrol - an interface to control z-Tree and z-Leaf

Here is a (hopefully helpful) interface for z-Tree laboratory experiments. labcontrol was intended to be an easy tool of controlling our laboratory at university and it is still in development. Most options are configurable with Gconf.

What labcontrol provides:

• a simple GTK-GUI, which shows the state of all clients and all possible actions
• get the current state automatically and update the GUI
• start and halt clients via wake-on-LAN and SSH
• detect all installed versions of zTree
• starting zTree in the detected versions with directory-options
• start and kill a suitable version of zleaf.exe via SSH on the clients or local zleafs for testing purposes
• printing receipts immediately after zTree has written the paymentfile and creating receipts from a user-defined paymentfile
• synchronize media content required by zLeaf's Multimedia-Box via rsync
• watch the desktop of the clients via VNC
• show a picture of the laboratory's webcam and update it periodically

• Installation Guide
• User Guide
• Linux Guide
• The source can be downloaded at launchpad

If you find the software useful, you are free to use it under the GPL.

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How to use z-Tree with GNU Linux

Here are also some general remarks on how to use z-Tree with GNU Linux.

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z-Tree and the statistical software R

For those who use R, here is a utility to import data from z-Tree into R (current version as of 2012-03-19, fixed issue with latin1-locale and chat-tables). It provides two commands, zTreeTables and zTreeSbj:

• zTreeTables (filelist,tables=c("globals","subjects"))
  The return value is then a list of all merged tables.

Example:
source("http://www.kirchkamp.de/lab/zTree.R")
zTT <- zTreeTables(c("080712_1412.xls","080712_1818.xls"))
with(zTT$subjects, table(Treatment,Period))


zTreeSbj takes a vector of .sbj-files and returns a matrix
files <- list.files(pattern = "*.sbj$",recursive=TRUE)
fname <- sub(".*/","",files)
sbj <- zTreeSbj(aggregate(files,list(fname),function(x) x[1])$x)


For those who (still) use Stata, Kan Takeuchi has written a utility to import data from z-Tree into Stata.

Read more about z-Tree at the z-Tree-Wiki.