Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Mark Rivers" <[email protected]> · Fri, 3 Dec 2010 15:34:55 -0600

Folks,

I have released a new version of the EPICS "dxp" module that is used to
control the XIA Saturn, xMAP, Mercury, and DXP4C2X DSP spectroscopy
systems.   

This is from the release notes:

This is a major new release. It adds many new features, the most
important being mapping mode support for the xMAP and support for the
Mercury. It eliminates the DXP record, so it is not backwards compatible
with medm screens, database files, or startup scripts from previous
releases.

- Added support for the mapping modes on the xMAP, in addition to the
normal MCA mode. These mapping modes are: 
  - MCA spectra mapping. In this mode spectra are collected into the
double-buffered on-board memory and streamed to disk continuously. Over
4,000 2048-channel spectra/second can be collected continuously, which
is over 1000 pixels/second for a 4-detector system. 
  - ROI (SCA) mapping. In this mode the total counts in up to 32 ROIs
(SCAS) for each channel are collected into the double-buffered on-board
memory and streamed to disk continuously. The dwell time per point can
be as short as 100 microseconds, which is over 5 million ROIs per second
for a 16-detector system with 32 ROIs per detector. 
  - List mode mapping. In this mode each x-ray event is recorded
separately, and tagged either with the time (20 ns resolution) or with
the current pixel number. 

- Added support for the Mercury, which is a new desktop model with many
of the features of the xMAP. It is available in a 1 or 4 channel
version, and has a USB 2.0 interface. It is supported on both Windows
and Linux. It supports the MCA mapping mode, but the firmware does not
yet support SCA or list mode mapping. 

- Added support for the ROI firmware on the Saturn. For Saturns equipped
with the optional 16 ROI hardware outputs, this allows very fast mapping
with the Saturn by putting out a TTL pulse whenever an x-ray falls
within that ROI. These pulses can be collected, for example, in an SIS
38xx multi-channel scaler, to do very fast on-the-fly scanning. 

- Implemented correct live-time reporting for the Saturn. In previous
releases counting for a preset live time worked correctly, but the
elapsed live time reported was for the fast (trigger) filter, not for
the slow (energy) filter. 

- Greatly reduced the time to initialize the xMAP system in iocInit,
from several minutes to 10 seconds for a 16-channel system. 

- Greatly reduced the time to copy the MCA record ROIs to the xMAP SCAs,
from several minutes to 2 seconds for a 16-channel system with 16 ROIs
per channel. 

- Added the ability to copy the ROIs from detector 1 to all detectors,
either by channel or by energy, in case the energy calibrations are
different. 

- Added additional diagnostic trace types for the xMAP. 

- Added generic read/write access to all low-level parameters on all
models. 

- Eliminated the DXP record, which was previously to control the DSP
parameters. This was replaced by a collection of standard EPICS records
(ao, ai, bo, bi, waveform, etc.). There is now a single driver that is
used for both DSP parameter control and for MCA data acquisition. This
driver is derived from the asynNDArray class in areaDetector, and
asynPortDriver class in asyn. 

- Increased maximum number of detectors in dxpMED.st from 32 to 100. 

- Increased maximum number of ROIs and SCAs in dxpMED.st from 16 to 32. 

The link to downloading the source code can be found here:

http://cars.uchicago.edu/software/epics/dxp

A tar file with pre-built binaries for Windows (cygwin-x86 and
win32-x86) and Linux (32 and 64 bit) can be found here.  

http://cars.uchicago.edu/software/pub/dxpStandalone_3-0.tgz

The release notes are here:

http://cars.uchicago.edu/software/epics/dxpReleaseNotes.html

The documentation is here:

http://cars.uchicago.edu/software/epics/dxpDoc.html

Cheers,
Mark

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System