Beamline Control
The Unit is headed by Laurent Claustre, and provides, develops and maintains software to control the beamlines, set up the experiment, position and control the environment of the sample, acquire all the data from the detectors and the sample and beamline environment needed to analyse the data, facilitate online data analysis during the experiment.
The Unit gives services to all the ESRF and CRG beamlines for both development and support. The developments are covering low-level drivers to online data analysis / visualization and four areas are fulfilled concerning:
- Hardware support software
- Graphical interfaces
- Automation projects
- Infrastructure software
The support mission of the unit can be broken down into three parts:
- beamline instrumentation projects where the unit participates to the beamline instrumentation life with small software developments, experiment macros and specific graphical applications
- the Unit acts for software consulting and auditing
- the Unit assumes instrument installations and problem resolutions
The role of the beamline control is to give the possibility to survey, drive and position the beamline components from a centralised application and to acquire and store experimental data. This is done using the client/server model, a sequencer to coordinate the control and the acquisition and graphical applications for the interaction with the user.
The base of the control system is the TACO / TANGO database and device drivers/servers for most of the electronics and some of the component. The software SPEC is the unique sequencer tool where the whole control of the beamline is centralized. For the graphical applications the Unit has developed a tool, the BlissFramework, for creating graphical user interfaces on beamlines.
see intranet site
Debian for Scientific Facilities Days