Beamline Operation Basics
This page and its linked pages will allow you to walk through the 12.2.2 control system step-by-step, similarly as you would be taught at the beamline by a staff scientist or engineer.
As a user you will sit in front of 3 monitors and 2 sets of keyboard and mice. The right two monitors concern the beamline operation, the left most concerns the control of the Mar345 image plate reader.
The mar terminal is separate for historic and trouble-shooting purposes, and will be explained separately. In general, all remote actions will be controlled by the experimenter from within one single PC, namely BL1222ACQ.
2 other PC's are running in the background and will be accessed by the experimenter via VNC from within BL1222ACQ.
These are:
- BL1222BCS:
This machine controls beamline-specific elements (BCS = Beamline Control System). - BL1222ES
This 32 bit machine runs most of the motor drivers (which are often not compatible with the 64 bit BL1222ACQ). It runs in the background and you should only in exceptional cases have to restart something on it)
All 3 beamline computers BL1222ACQ, BL1222ES, BL1222BCS) operate LabView as control software. In all 3 cases, the software is started by double-clicking on the icon BL Control Main situated in the center of the screen.
It will open Labview and load the control software. Once this is completed you'll see an image similar to this (note the exact image varies depending on which machine you are starting LabView on):
Press the white arrow circled red in the image. This will load and start all the sub-system needed. You know that this is done once all the subsystem status 'lights' (encircled red below) have turned green (or are left grey in some cases):
This is the main window from which all operations and sub-windows will be called from.
