caspervector / mamba-ose

Interactive experiment control toolkit for HEPS - fully open-source edition

Mamba

Mamba is the experimental control framework-to-be of HEPS. It aims to provide

• A GUI frontend with a variety of widgets available to (but not limited to)

  • Control the parameters of devices on the beamline;
  • Design experiment patterns and run experiments routines;
  • Do data analysis and visualisation, online or off-line, using HPC or not.

• All of these are supported by a backend running inside an IPython shell, and communicates with the frontend using ZeroMQ; the backend is the part of Mamba which actually interacts with the Bluesky objects inside the shell.

• Both the frontend and the backend run on the Linux-based beamline-control server, and both are Python 3 only; the xpra GUI forwarding system allows for comfortable remote access from popular operating systems.

Usage

• Building and (optionally) installation:

  $ pip3 install -r requirements.txt
  $ ./prepare.sh
  $ python3 ./setup.py install  # For real installation; maybe with `--user`.

• Before first use (customise the config after this):

  $ mkdir -p ~/.mamba
  $ cp docs/example_config.yaml ~/.mamba/config.yaml
  $ cp docs/example_init.py ~/.mamba/init.py

• Routine use, starting the backend first:

  $ mamba-cli  # After real installation; otherwise see below.
  $ cd /path/to/mamba
  $ python3 -m mamba.backend.mamba_cli

• Routine use, starting the frontend in another terminal:

  $ mamba-gui  # After real installation; otherwise see below.
  $ cd /path/to/mamba
  $ python3 -m mamba.frontend.mamba_gui