It is time again for some short items bunched together:
Holidays: I’ve been on holidays last week, the first true holiday in a long time. However, work has become very hectic as I’m trying to juggle too many things all at once. There’s yet another round of revisions to do to the Round Robin paper, people to interview and hire, projects to start, measurements to do, funding to apply for, and meanwhile, my publication list is looking frighteningly barren. Suffice to say, I’m currently in a state of constant, mild panic. Here’s hoping things will settle in place in the near future, but that brings me to the second item:
Update frequencies: As you will have noticed, I’m not managing a post a week anymore. It’s reduced to one post per two weeks, partly due to my reduced time playing around with SAXS next to my organisational/administrative duties, and partly due to the reduced “free” time I can spend on these posts. Nevertheless, I hope that the bi-weekly schedule will still be interesting! In the mean time, why not head over to ScienceOpen, and see the three SAXS-related collections there!
USAXS: I’ve been doing a little work on the USAXS instrument as well, trying to figure out the control system. I was impressed by a brief Tango demonstration by Olivier Taché at CEA, saw it running at Soleil, and so I think that is the way to go for this instrument. It requires network-connected device servers, which form a bridge between the devices (motor controllers, shutters, sensors, etc.) and a universal Tango protocol to be used over the network. In this way, you can connect anything and everything to a network, organize the devices, and address them from a controlling program.
It’s not too easy a system to install and understand at first go, and it has too little “first steps”-documentation, but it will run on a Raspberry Pi (the device servers at least), and Olivier’s being very helpful sending me hints to implement it. Once I get some more experience with it, I’ll share it with you.
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