Setting up a synchrotron X-ray beamline (BL) requires a series of QC tasks to be done. This app is a combination of a QT5 GUI plus a series of modules that will help a staff member follow the steps required to delivery a beamline to users.
The GUI is written in QT5 using QT designer to generate UI files and later convert them to python (v3.7). This should make it fairly easy to port and modify the GUI. On another hand some abstraction layer is in place so that changing the config file as well as modifiying the modules defined under modules/ one can change the underlying behaviour.
Although it is possible to automate most of the tasks in terms of running beamline equipment to perform and drive things (e.g. calculate centroid of beam and move beam to chrosshairs or vice versa) this is not the main aim for this application as each synchrotron and beamline will have their own hardware/software implementations. Instead the main objective of this application is to provide :
- Run a systematic list of tasks before delivering a BL to users
- Be a guide to a new staff member on what is required to deliver a BL to users
- Collect data (number, pictures, etc) for each task so that some kind of FOM can be obtained
- Log what tasks are done each day allowing awareness of how long is not run
- Provide a QC report that could be given to users for each experiment
This is a re-write in QT5 of a system that was very successfully run at the Australian Synchrotron two MX beamlines from 2013 to 2019. The original was based in WXPython and Python v2.7 so there was a need to update the technologies. The original was written by Nathan Cowieson (now at DLS) and modified by David Aragao (also now at DLS) and others from 2015 to 2019. Original wxPython code resides in github
