The Advanced Photon Source
a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility

TXM Control System

TXM is an experiment control and data processing system for tomography beamlines. The software, written in C++ using Qt, interfaces with EPICS for beamline control and provides live and offline data viewing, basic image manipulation features, and scan sequencing that coordinates EPICS-enabled apparatus.
Live and offline data can be displayed. The application can capture single, multiple, or continually streamed images. All standard areaDetector properties such as binning, region-of-interest (ROI), gain, exposure time, acquire period, data type, image mode, etc. can be configured. Detector-specific features exposed with Area Detector may also be made accessible.
 
Graphical annotations are available as image overlays for simple analysis or system calibration. A marker annotation allows users to mark static points in the image. A calibrated ruler annotation allows quick measurements in user-defined units.
 
Color maps and contrast can be adjusted by setting RGB values, and the low and high values can be clamped using a graphical editor. An auto-levels function searches for the lowest and highest non-zero value and clamps the map appropriately.
 
EPICS-enabled devices, such as motors, are displayed on a separate calibration window. These devices may be configured dynamically via the application’s preferences window. Devices may be added, removed, or disabled during run time. The addition or removal of devices is reflected automatically in the user interface without the need to edit traditional display manager configuration files.
 
Configurable scanning is the most important feature of the experiment control software. The system is designed to be extensible and easy for a non-expert user to configure. Users can configure all scan parameters via the user interface.

 

Distribution & Impact

TXM is the main experiment control interface used by the nano-tomography beamline 32-ID-C at the APS.

 

Funding Source

This project has been produced using operational funding from the APS, contract DE-AC02-06CH11357.

 

Please cite

N. Schwarz, Khan, F., Yue, K., Hammonds, J., De Carlo, F., “Experiment Control and Analysis for High-Resolution Tomography,” Proceedings of ICALEPCS 2013 – the 14th International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems, San Francisco, California, 10/07/2013 – 10/11/2013. (slides) (manuscript)

 

Future Work

Work is currently underway to add a programmable scanning capability to the application so that it may be used by more beamlines.