This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. Primary support for the subproject and the subproject's principal investigator may have been provided by other sources, including other NIH sources. The Total Cost listed for the subproject likely represents the estimated amount of Center infrastructure utilized by the subproject, not direct funding provided by the NCRR grant to the subproject or subproject staff. Objectives ?The objectives stated in the renewal proposal are these: We will develop a versatile web-based job-queuing system to allow asynchronous off-site control of the automated data-collection process, we'll develop and disseminate true remote operation of all of our beamline systems, we will continue in the international collaboration to produce the software named EDNA for autonomous and intelligent data collection, will incorporate the mini-kappa orienters on several of our diffractometers to provide automatic multi-pass data collection with complete data sets and true redundancy, and will work to extend the capabilities of our EPICS systems. Results ?We have refined a grid-scanning procedure to locate crystals by searching for diffraction. It is fast and many users employ it. It has a very clean interface allowing the users to go to the grid location of best diffraction. Annie H?roux presented this at the Chicago Synchrotron Radiation Instrumentation conference last fall. We made significant progress on asynchronous-remote """"""""Q"""""""" data collection. The challenge is to be able to run through samples at an unattended beamline, review the results through a PXDB sweep query, then remount samples with enough reproducibility that the same position on the crystal, or a new user-chosen position, can be shot. Part of this requires a very reproducible centering and finding of the """"""""flat face"""""""" of the loop. This has been improved by trading the C3D image-analysis program from Grenoble (ESRF) for the Hamburg(DESY)-written XREC in this step. We use XREC only to align the loop and find the flat face. We've integrated our grid scan into the procedure to find the crystal. EDNA is used to do preliminary analysis and indexing. At the end of the winter shutdown, this was all working and we ran through a full dewar worth of samples to test. We hope to push this further in the May shutdown. The Dectris Pilatus 6M arrived in March and we integrated it smoothly into CBASS at X25 with the EPICS area Detector module. The grid scan runs very much faster with this detector, thanks in part to software donated by Chris Nielsen of ADSC. Beamline X26-C's correlated X-ray diffraction and Absorption Spectroscopy work was pushed further through the summer of 2010 with the assistance of a high school summer student, Michael Skinner. He developed a Java program that continuously plots acquired spectra and allows for tracking of single light wavelengths during correlated runs. A version of this tool is available through the PXDB sweep query, allowing investigators to view results later. A Java-based interface to the Oxford Univ. program RADDOSE, which calculates the absorbed x-ray dose a specimen experiences, was also developed that lets one predict the radiation dose to samples, and preliminary work was done on putting RADDOSE results in spectra file headers. John Skinner gave a presentation on all of this at the 2010 ACA meeting in Chicago. Skinner adapted CBASS architecture for use at beamline X9 for SAXS/WAXS experiment control. He stripped CBASS down to just a skeleton of its architecture, then added what was needed to make it a SAXS/WAXS control program. This was not a lot of work, and the resulting GUI is in use and was a major component of two posters that the X9 staff has presented. One was at the ESRF and another at the SRI Chicago meeting. This relationship with X9 is a good case for our software having a place in NSLS-II. In a similar collaboration, John Skinner gave a presentation at IBM's Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights NY to assist Beamline X20 staff with their software upgrade efforts, as they look ahead to NSLS-II. We added EPICS control of the beam-position monitor (at the monochromator) at X25. Using our grid-scan code and the general flexibility of CBASS to develop experiments on the fly, we assisted NSLS-II staff in their development of a White Beam Position Monitor, which is now in place and operational at X25. To further this effort, we built control of an Acromag IP 330 analog-to-digital converter module into our RTEMS kernel that runs on our VME crates. Again, this is a good advertisement for the suitability of our software at NSLS-II. Both BPMs now write to the HTML logs and can be viewed from PXDB sweep queries. Plans ?We will continue to respond to opportunities and make firm contacts with NSLS-II software workers. Most of these projects, including Queue-driven data collection and super-fast grid scanning, continue vigorously. Significance ?This group has thrived over the decades by being resolutely innovative in both software and flexibility in providing for the needs of experimenters.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 167 publications
