Data Acquisition Group

Focus scans, which are made to ensure the hardware holding an experimental sample is correctly positioned with respect to the incoming beam, are a particular example where usability becomes a key factor in making progress, as the ability to re-establish the best focus point with a few clicks of the mouse can save a lot of time. Automating the data gathering part of this operation as much as possible, leaving the user to just select the focus point itself, can become especially important during long, perhaps overnight experimental sessions when the risk of human error in manually filling in such data can increase. This is one of the areas where the advances delivered as part of the Mapping Project by the Data Acquisition, Data Analysis and Beamline Controls groups have allowed us to substantially improve usability by implementing such an automated solution, removing sources of potential error from the process. On the Scanning X-ray Microscopy beamline (I08) this new Focus Scan wizard has been very well received by beamline staff and users allowing them to get on quickly to the actual business of their experiment and removing the potentially costly risk of misconfiguration. Making use of the new hardware triggered scanning infrastructure implemented by the Beamline Controls group, the data acquisition software is quickly able to produce a single image on screen from which the user can easily interpret the best point of focus and then click it to prompt the experimental hardware to move to the corresponding position. This wizard is now a standard tool on the Mapping User Interface and is thus available to other mapping enabled beamlines, some of whom have begun to adopt it in the last few weeks. By harnessing the new techniques available in our software platforms in this way, we can now start to effectively target our efforts towards improving and simplifying the process of carrying out experiments at Diamond. This in turn should lead to more productive user sessions helping scientists get the most out of their time on the beamline.

In producing Data Acquisition support software for new and upgraded beamlines, the ability to prototype, evaluate and hone the tools we develop as early as possible in the beamline build and commissioning process is key to ensuring successful delivery of new experimental capabilities at Diamond. It allows us to debug and address problems up front and to work closely with beamline scientists to collaboratively design the user experience that will eventually be delivered, long before the finished beamline exists. During the last year, the opportunity to do this has been improved substantially by the installation of the P99 test beamline as part of the ongoing ptychography Data Analysis project being carried out by the data analysis group. Use of this small scale laser based analogue of a full beamline setup enables Data Acquisition engineers to exercise the software tools and processes they are developing, whilst connected to actual representative hardware of the sort that will eventually be used on the real installation. This approach has come to the fore in recent months on the project to develop Data Acquisition support of the new DIAD (Dual Imaging And Diffraction) beamline, currently under construction next to I12. DIAD will produce two separate beams to enable the use of two different X-ray measurement techniques; diffraction and imaging.To allow each technique to capture the desired results a Novel Beam Selector device (a prototype of which exists) is placed in the path of the main beam at the end of the optics hutch. This selector will need to be controlled by our data acquisition software via the hardware triggering layer developed by the Controls Group to ensure the high speed switching required for the planned experiments. The availability of the P99 test beamline has allowed both our teams to start actively developing the processes that will drive this selector on the real beamline by temporarily installing the prototype on P99 and working together to design and debug scans on a setup that closely resembles the real installation. Working in this way ensures that we maximise the chance of discovering and addressing any issues that arise long before the functionality is needed and also allows us to engage DIAD’s beamline scientists in this process to get their feedback and ensure that our approaches are valid.

In the coming years the upgraded Data Acquisition and Controls platform now available to us will allow us to start to roll out similar targeted functionality across all of Diamond’s beamlines using this collaborative approach. This should allow us to deliver functionality that enables new techniques and optimises existing ones, allowing our scientists and users to concentrate on the specifics of their experiments and the insights they yield. In addition, the hardware level control now supported will help develop other recent automated beamline installations such as VMXi allowing them to optimise the control of their experiments to maximise their efficiency.