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BMM’s Desktop

A. BMM’s Desktop#

This section provides an explanation of how to recover BMM’s data collection workspace after restarting the computer.

This is made a bit easier if a couple of symbolic links are made in ~/bin/. If not already done, do this at the command line:

ln -s ~/.ipython/profile_collection/startup/consumer/run-consumer ~/bin/run-consumer
ln -s ~/git/BMM-beamline-configuration/tools/run-cadashboard ~/bin/run-cadashboard

A.1. Monitoring#

To have eyeballs on the operation of the beamline, we want Phoebus for engineering screens and the cadashboard application for the heads-up overview of the state of the beamline.

Phoebus (engineering screens)

There are two ways to start Phoebus.

The more hands-on way is to open a new terminal window or tab, the type run-phoebus at the command line. This will open the Phoebus window and it should remember to place it on the top screen.

It is not necessary to keep open the terminal window used to launch Phoebus. Phoebus is very noisy, spewing en endless stream of logging messages to the screen. Happily, it forks itself upon launch, so it is not necessary to keep that terminal window open. If you first opened a new window or tab, you can safely close it.

There should be an icon for Phoebus on the icon bar at the bottom of the screen. It looks like a red eyeball. Click on it.

Once Phoebus is open, if the layout was not restored, click on the “Window” menu, then on “Load Layout”, then select “Two cameras”.

cadashboard

Open a new terminal window. Resize the window so it is a few lines tall, and the full width of the screen.

At the command line run run-cadashboard. Make the font much bigger by hitting Ctrl-Shift-+ several times – maybe as many as 10 – until it takes up the full width of the screen.

Resize the height to just cover the three lines of the dashboard. Move the terminal to the very top of the top screen. You can hide the window decoration by using Windows-rightclick to position the terminal window.

_images/monitoring.png

Fig. A.1 Once Phoebus and cadashboard are open, they should look something like this.#

A.2. Data collection and visualization#

The easiest way to manage data collection and visualization is to have a terminal window with 3 tabs. One tab is used for bsui, the data acquisition program. A second tab is for the Kafka consumer which handles most data visualization chores. The third tab is just a normal bash command line, which is always handy to have available.

Once you have a three-tab setup, go to the tab for bsui. At the command line type bsui. bsui startup at BMM is rather time-consuming, but after a couple minutes it is ready to go.

Now go to the tab for the Kafka consumer. At the command line, type run-consumer. This will take a minute or so to start, eventually saying Ready to receive documents.... At this point, scans will generate plots.

_images/bsui_startup2.png
_images/consumer_startup.png

Fig. A.2 (Right) The tail end of the bsui startup messages and the command prompt in the bsui tab. (Left) The Kafka plotting consumer in its tab awaiting commands from bsui.#

A.3. All the rest#

Some other things that are handy to have on the desktop during an experiment:

Note that there are buttons on the icon bar at the bottom of the screen for Athena and Hephaestus.


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