Sardana is a software suite, based on Tango Controls, for Supervision, Control, and Data Acquisition in scientific installations. It aims to reduce the cost and time of design, development and support of the control, and data acquisition systems. Sardana development was started at the ALBA synchrotron and today is supported by a larger community which includes several other laboratories and individuals (ALBA, DESY, MaxIV, MBI-Berlin, Solaris, ESRF).
Sardana Continuous Scans Workshop will be hosted by the SOLARIS and held on September 20th & 21st 2023. Speakers and attendees are welcome on-site but the sessions will be also accessible remotely.
As other similar frameworks, Sardana offers continuous scans to the users. The current design of our continuous scans is dated for 2013-2015. Anticipating new requirements we are starting discussions on eventual enhancement projects. The purpose of this workshop will be to learn from other similar frameworks on their approaches to continuous scans, exchange implemented solutions to advanced continuous scan cases, and discuss possible collaborations.
Presentations and discussions will cover:
- Sardana framework
- Bliss framework
- Bluesky framework
- Flyscan framework
- Solution from DESY
- Solution from Diamond
The proposed 2 days event will be organized in three parts.
Day One - Part One:
Invited speakers of similar frameworks will give short presentations: general architecture, current features, possibilities of each framework, and a short and mid-term roadmap.
Day One - Part Two:
Invited speakers of similar frameworks will give detailed presentations on their approaches to continuous scans, and solutions to advanced continuous scan cases (not necessarily implemented as parts of the frameworks). Ideally referring to the missing features in Sardana, as listed below:
Note: terms are explained in https://sardana-controls.org/devel/overview/index.html.
Missing features requiring minor or moderate development efforts in Sardana:
- Report the theoretical position of the record in the middle of the acquisition interval – currently, it is the beginning of the interval
- Report latency time from the trigger/gate controller - currently it is reported only from the experimental channel controller to be considered when calculating the synchronization description.
- Master/slave configuration of trigger/gate elements in measurement group configuration (will require changes in the experiment configuration user interface and the trigger/gate controller interface)
- Measurement group configuration feed with default experimental channel configurations when a channel is added to the measurement group
- Decouple software synchronized experimental channels to allow different acquisition frequencies and avoid waiting for the slowest one – readuce dead time
- Add timeout for motion when there is a problem with never ending motion
- Add early timeout for no data e.g. missing triggers already after the motion started, or eventually add more feedback to the user, for not waiting for the late timeout only after the motion finished
- Add a configuration interface for the master motor (the one used for synchronization purposes) in scans of pseudomotors
- Validate measurement group configuration before step scan to prevent running them with start synchronization (not compatible)
Missing features requiring major development efforts in Sardana:
- Allow different synchronization descriptions (when or on what positions the synchronization events should occur) e.g. involving shutter control, synchronizing with the accelerator events
- Implement trajectory control using pseudomotors. Currently, only possible with motors which actually involve multiple physical actuators.
- Support for multiple capability controllers i.e motion and trigger gate in the same controller class – use capability composition approach.
- Improve support high speed scans - improve data flow to avoid bottlenecks e.g. pseudo counters, data storage, etc.
Day Two:
Discussing and brainstorming about:
- Roadmap for Sardana continuous scans enhancements
- Solutions to the above listed missing features
- Possibilities of collaborations
All contributions are very welcome! If you want to share your experience or needs with Sardana continuous scans, you are more than welcome to.
The agenda and all information about speakers, transportation and so will be published soon.
On behalf of Sardana Development Team and Sardana Community,
Michał Piekarski
Zbigniew Reszela
Guifré Cuní
