PandA(Box) flies on Bluesky: maintainable and user-friendly fly scans with Mamba at HEPS

TL;DR

This paper presents a new, maintainable, and user-friendly integration of PandABox fly scan control into the Bluesky-based Mamba system at HEPS, enabling flexible and online visual feedback for XRF mapping.

Contribution

It introduces a compact, extensible backend for controlling PandABox within Bluesky, and a Mamba frontend for improved user experience in fly scans.

Findings

Successful port of PandABox control to Bluesky

Development of a user-friendly Mamba frontend for XRF mapping

Enabling flexible, online visual feedback during fly scans

Abstract

Purpose: Fly scans are indispensible in many experiments at the High Energy Photon Source (HEPS). PandABox, the main platform to implement fly scans at HEPS, needs to be integrated into Mamba, the experiment control system developed at HEPS based on Bluesky. Methods: In less than 600 lines of easily customisable and extensible backend code, provided are full control of PandABox's TCP server in native ophyd, automated configuration (also including wiring) of "PandA blocks" for constant-speed mapping experiments of various dimensions, as well as generation of scans deliberately fragmented to deal with hardware limits in numbers of exposure frames or sequencer table entries. Results: The upper-level control system for PandABox has been ported to Bluesky, enabling the combination of both components' flexibility in fly-scan applications. Based on this backend, a user-friendly Mamba frontend is developed for X-ray fluorescence (XRF) mapping experiments, which provides fully online visual feedback.