Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Peter Milne <[email protected]> · Wed, 28 Mar 2012 12:43:45 +0100

Hi Mark

So, all the embedded processor has to do is to transfer the raw 2D data

to a host computer by whatever means necessary, and areaDetector takes

care of the rest. Sounds good, thanks!

/Peter

On 03/28/2012 12:14 PM, Mark Rivers wrote:

Hi Peter,

The EPICS areaDetector module supports an object called an NDArray,
which is an N-dimensional array.  EPICS drivers generate these arrays
from the underlying hardware library, and pass them to plugins.
Plugins do things like save the arrays to disk, send the data to
EPICS waveform records, perform statistics calculations on them, and
extract regions-of-interest (ROIs).  The ROIs can be any dimensions,
so they can extract single rows, single columns, etc.  The ROI plugin
is itself a source of new NDArrays, and plugin chains can be
constructed at run-time.

In your case, if your driver generated NDArrays (N=2) you could do
the following:

Driver ->  ROI plugin (extract 1 row or column) ->  waveform record
plugin

This processing all happens below the level of EPICS records, so it
is very fast and efficient.  Data rates of hundred of megabytes per
second are not a problem.

Although the NDArrays were designed originally to be used in
imaging-type detectors, I have used them for a spectroscopy detector
somewhat similar to yours, where the data contain spectra, not
images.

Mark

________________________________________ From:
[email protected] [[email protected]] on
behalf of Peter Milne [[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, March
28, 2012 4:47 AM To: Tech-talk Subject: Extract a column of data from
2D Waveform Record

The ACQ196 multi-channel digitizer includes an embedded
microprocessor and EPICS IOC, and in normal operation outputs a
Waveform Record per channel on a relaxed schedule, 1Hz typical.

The data from the hardware is a 2D array in [sample][channel] order,
and embedded software takes care of extracting ("channelizing") the
data so that each waveform record is a 1D array   eg CH01[sample].

Now we have a requirement to run this at higher pulse rates, up to
60Hz. The embedded software will not be able to channelize the raw
data at this rate, although it should be possible to present a single
Waveform Record per pulse containing the 2D data.

My question is how to handle this 2D record in a client and/or soft
IOC running on another host?.

The client software needs to be able to take a slice [:][ch].

Maybe it's quite easy to do this outside the IOC (eg with Python
Channel access), but ideally it would happen inside an IOC so that
it's completely transparent to a client. The Subarray record is an
obvious choice, but it appears to take a contiguous block of data,
there doesn't seem to be a concept of a stride value.

eg assuming the Waveform Record refers to data [samples][channels]
with dimension (typical) [1024][96], the extract routine needs to run
through the data set with a stride of 96.

It looks like subarray could be used to extract [sample-N][:] but
not the required [:][channel].

Any suggestions welcome.

Thanks

Peter.

-- Peter Milne                     [email protected] D-TACQ
Solutions Ltd            www.d-tacq.com

--
Peter Milne			[email protected]
D-TACQ Solutions Ltd		www.d-tacq.com

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System