Python Scripting for Instrument Control and Online Data Treatment
Norman Xiong, Nick Hauser, David Männicke · JACOW · 2015
Scripting is an important feature of instrument control software. It allows scientists to execute a sequence of tasks to run complex experiments, and it makes a software developers' life easier when testing and deploying new features. Modern instrument control applications require easy to develop and reliable scripting support. At ANSTO we provide a Python scripting interface for Gumtree. Gumtree is an application that provides three features; instrument control, data treatment and visualisation for neutron scattering instruments. The scripting layer has been used to coordinate these three features. The language is simple and well documented, so scientists require minimal programming experience. The scripting engine has a web interface so that users can use a web browser to run scripts remotely. The script interface has a numpy-like library that makes data treatment easier. It also has a GUI library that automatically generates control panels for scripts. The same script can be loaded in both the workbench (desktop) application and the web service application for online data treatment. In both cases a GUI will be generated with similar look and feel.