Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Mark Rivers" <[email protected]> · Sun, 23 Aug 2009 14:25:59 -0500

Folks,

I have released a new version (R1-5) of the areaDetector module.

The home page is here:
http://cars.uchicago.edu/software/epics/areaDetector.html

The documentation is here:
http://cars.uchicago.edu/software/epics/areaDetectorDoc.html

It is also available on SourceForge:
http://epics.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/epics/applications/tags/areaDetector/1-5/

This is a major new release with many additional features.

This is from the release notes:

- New driver for mar345 online image plate detector. This driver communicates via a TCP/IP socket with the mar345dtb program, which must be used to control the detector. 

- New driver for Firewire IIDC/DCAM cameras under Windows. This driver uses the Windows 1394 camera driver from Carnegie Mellon University. 

- New driver for the Perkin-Elmer amorphous silicon flat panel detectors. Thanks to Brian Tieman and John Hammonds for this driver. 

- New driver for the Roper Scientific detectors using the PVCAM library. Thanks to Brian Tieman for this driver. 

- Added support for color to the simulation detector driver. It now supports color modes Mono, RGB1, RGB2 and RGB3. 

- Fixed 2 serious bugs in the Roper driver.

- Solved problem of Prosilica driver crashing on Linux. The problem was with the SIGALARM signal handlers in EPICS base (R3.14.10 and earlier). There is a patch for base to fix this problem, and this fix will be included in EPICS base 3.14.11. 

- Added "attributes" to NDArray. Attributes are used to contain metadata about the array. Each attribute has a name, description, datatype and value. Attributes can be added by drivers or plugins, and travel with the array through the plugin chain, and can ultimately be written with the array data to a file. Attributes can come from driver or plugin parameters, or from EPICS PVs anywhere on the network. 

- Changed NDPluginFile from directly supporting netCDF to be a base class from which actual file plugins derive. 

- Changed netCDF file support to be derived class inheriting from NDPluginFile. Added support for writing NDArray attributes to the netCDF file. 

- New file plugin for TIFF files. The TIFF support includes 8, 16 and 32-bit integers. It supports monochrome and color images, including all 3 color interleave modes (RGB1, RGB2 and RGB3. 

- New file plugin for JPEG files. The JPEG support is limited to 8-bit integers, but it supports monochrome and color images, including all 3 color interleave modes (RGB1, RGB2 and RGB3). Control is provided for the JPEG quality (compression) on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best). 

- New file plugin for NeXus HDF files written by John Hammonds. The NeXus support has not been extensively tested, and is currently limited to writing a single array per file. Support for multiple arrays per file will be added in a future release. 

- Fixed bug in NDPluginFile: was not closing file properly when stream mode was stopped before the requested number of frames. 

- Fixed logic problem with FileNumber record in NDFile.template database. The previous logic that kept the ao record in sync with the ai record was causing the ao record to process when it should not have been, causing an extra call to the driver. 

- Added new top-level detector-specific medm displays for Prosilica (prosilica.adl), Firewire (firewire.adl), and simDetector (simDetector.adl). ADBase.adl should no longer be used for these cameras. 

- Added new ImageJ plugin viewer. This was begun by Tim Madden from APS, and now includes support for all NDArray data types and color modes, i.e. Mono, RGB1 (pixel interleave), RGB2 (row interleave) and RGB3 (plane interleave). The plugin directory includes a plugin written elsewhere for reading and writing netCDF files, so ImageJ can be used to display images and image sequences (movies) saved with the NDFileNetCDF plugin. It also includes a dynamic profile plugin written elsewhere for line profiles that update in real time as new images are displayed. 

- Improved IDL epics_ad_display viewer. The last image is now stored in the program, and it is now redisplayed if the view mode is changed (TVSCL to iimage, etc.) or if the display parameters are changed (autoscale, flip Y, minimum, maximum, etc.). 

- Documented the source code with comments that doxygen can process to produce HTML documentation directly from the source. This provides documentation for each class, as well as the class inheritance tree. Thanks to John Hammonds for starting this. 

Cheers,
Mark

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System