College Park, Maryland June 6 - 10 , 2004 |
TP72: New Instrument Control Software at the NCNR
N.C. Maliszewskyj (NIST Center for Neutron Research), M Doucet (University of Maryland, College Park), S. Pheiffer
The construction and installation of a state of the art thermal triple axis at the NCNR presents us with the opportunity to similarly craft new software that addresses the needs of our local staff and outside users. An autonomous instrument control server will mediate interactions of users with hardware, manage data acquisition, and sequence commands for batch execution. Client programs incorporating experiment planning tools will be used to compose scans, issue instanteous commands to be executed by the server, and provide the first layer of live status information. A tiered permission scheme will permit certain types of remote operation in this client-server system.
This software is designed with portability in mind. A hardware abstraction layer ("middleware") encapsulates the most platform dependent portions of the code while the remainder of the instrument control server is essentially a platform independent python script. We will present an architectural overview of this suite and an update of the current state of the project.
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