Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Mark Rivers <[email protected]> · Sat, 1 Jul 2017 13:44:26 +0000

The initial release of a new ADViewers module in areaDetector is now available.  This is from the release notes:

- Initial release.  
  - Prior to the release of ADCore R3-0 the code in ADViewers was in the Viewers subdirectory of ADCore.

- ImageJ/EPICS_areaDetector/EPICS_NTNDA_Viewer.java
  . This is a new ImageJ plugin written by Tim Madden and Marty Kraimer.
  It is essentially identical to EPICS_AD_Viewer.java except that it displays NTNDArrays from the NDPluginPva plugin, i.e. using pvAccess to transport the images rather than   NDPluginStdArrays which uses Channel Access.
  This has a number of advantages:
    - The NTNDArray data is transmitted "atomically" over the network, rather than using separate PVs for the image data and the metadata (image dimensions, color mode, etc.)
    - When using Channel Access the data type of the waveform record is fixed at iocInit, and cannot be changed at runtime. This means, for example, that if the user might want to view both 8-bit images, 16-bit images, and 64-bit double FFT images then the waveform record would need to be 64-bit double, which adds a factor of 8 network overhead when viewing 8-bit images. pvAccess changes the data type of the NTNDArrays dynamically at run-time, removing this restriction.
  - Channel Access requires setting EPICS_CA_MAX_ARRAY_BYTES, which is a source of considerable confusion and frustration for users. pvAccess does not use EPICS_CA_MAX_ARRAY_BYTES and there is no restriction on the size of the NTNDArrays.
  - The performance using pvAccess is significantly better than using Channel Access. NDPluginPva is 5-10 times faster than NDPluginStdArrays, and ImageJ can display 1.5-2 times more images/s with pvAccess than with Channel Access.

The required EPICS V4 jar files are included in ImageJ/EPICS_areaDetector. This entire directory should be copied to the ImageJ/plugins folder, and then one time do ImageJ/Compile and run and select the file EPICS_NTNDA_Viewer.java.

Users are encouraged to switch to using pvAccess with this new plugin.

- Viewers/ImageJ/EPICS_AD_Viewer.java
  - Previously this ImageJ plugin monitored the UniqueId_RBV PV in the NDPluginStdArrays plugin, and read the new image from this plugin when UniqueId_RBV changed.
However, this does not work correctly with the new ProcessPlugin feature in NDPluginDriver, because that does not increment the UniqueId. EPICS_AD_Viewer.java was changed so that it now monitors the ArrayCounter_RBV PV in NDPluginStdArrays rather than UniqueId_RBV. ArrayCounter_RBV will increment every time the plugin receives a new NDArray, which fixes the problem.
Note that ArrayCounter_RBV will also change if the user manually changes ArrayCounter, for example by setting it back to 0. This will also cause ImageJ to display the image, when it would not have done so previously. This should not be a problem.

The home page is here:
https://github.com/areaDetector/ADViewers

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

The release notes are here:
https://github.com/areaDetector/ADViewers/blob/master/RELEASE.md

Mark

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System