areaDetector Release Notes
Release 1-5 (23-August-2009)
- General
- Added "attributes" to NDArray. Attributes are used to contain metadata about the
array. Each attribute has a name, description, datatype and value. Attributes can
be added by drivers or plugins, and travel with the array through the plugin chain,
and can ultimately be written with the array data to a file. Attributes can come
from driver or plugin parameters, or from EPICS PVs anywhere on the network.
- Separated parameters and functions which are general to NDArray data (asynNDArrayDriver
base class) from those which are specific to areaDetector data (ADDriver base class).
This makes it easy and clean to use asynNDArray driver for future applications beyond
areaDetector, such as drivers for the XIA xMAP digital spectroscopy system.
- Drivers
- New driver for mar345 online image plate detector. This driver communicates via
a TCP/IP socket with the mar345dtb program, which must be used to control the detector.
- New driver for Firewire IIDC/DCAM cameras under Windows. This driver uses the
Windows 1394 camera driver from Carnegie Mellon University.
- New driver for the Perkin-Elmer amorphous silicon flat panel detectors. Thanks
to Brian Tieman and John Hammonds for this driver.
- New driver for the Roper Scientific detectors using the PVCAM library. Thanks
to Brian Tieman for this driver.
- Added support for color to the simulation detector driver. It now supports color
modes Mono, RGB1, RGB2 and RGB3.
- Fixed 2 serious bugs in the Roper driver. It was not selecting ROI mode correctly.
When NumAcquisitions was > 1 it was only collecting the first frame correctly,
subsequent frames were the same as a first one. This has been isolated to a bug
in the WinView COM interface, and a workaround for the problem has been implemented.
- Solved problem of Prosilica driver crashing on Linux. The problem was with the
SIGALARM signal handlers in EPICS base (R3.14.10 and earlier). There is a patch
for base to fix this problem, and this fix will be included in EPICS base 3.14.11.
- Added an additional state, "Initializing" to DetectorState_RBV record.
- Added support for ADTriggerMode=External in marCCD driver. In this mode the AcquireTime
is not used to stop acquisition; acquisition must be stopped by external software
settings Acquire=0. The AcquireTime PV is written to the marCCD TIFF file header
as usual. This allows an external timing control of the shutter but with the actual
exposure time written to the header. Fixed minor problem with marCCD driver. If
Acquire was set to Stop when it was not acquiring then the next time acquisition
was started it would stop immediately.
- Plugins
- Changed NDPluginFile from directly supporting netCDF to be a base class from which
actual file plugins derive.
- Changed netCDF file support to be derived class inheriting from NDPluginFile.
Added support for writing NDArray attributes to the netCDF file.
- New file plugin for TIFF files. The TIFF support includes 8, 16 and 32-bit integers.
It supports monochrome and color images, including all 3 color interleave modes
(RGB1, RGB2 and RGB3. areaDetector contains all required support files to build
and run the TIFF file plugin on win32-x86, cygwin-x86 and Linux. To build on other
operating systems it is necessary to install the libtiff and libtiffstatic packages.
Thanks to John Hammonds for the initial work on this plugin.
- New file plugin for JPEG files. The JPEG support is limited to 8-bit integers,
but it supports monochrome and color images, including all 3 color interleave modes
(RGB1, RGB2 and RGB3). Control is provided for the JPEG quality (compression) on
a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best). areaDetector contains all required support files
to build and run the JPEG file plugin on win32-x86, cygwin-x86, and Linux. To build
on other operating systems it is necessary to install the libjpeg and libjpegstatic
packages.
- New file plugin for NeXus HDF files written by John Hammonds. The NeXus support
has not been extensively tested, and is currently limited to writing a single array
per file. Support for multiple arrays per file will be added in a future release.
areaDetector contains all required support files to build and run the NeXus file
plugin on win32-x86, cygwin-x86 and Linux. To build on other operating systems it
is necessary to install the Nexus, HDF4, HDF5, and MXML packages.
- Fixed bug in NDPluginFile: was not closing file properly when stream mode was
stopped before the requested number of frames.
- Fixed logic problem with FileNumber record in NDFile.template database. The previous
logic that kept the ao record in sync with the ai record was causing the ao record
to process when it should not have been, causing an extra call to the driver.
- Added an additional record to NDPluginBase.template, PluginType_RBV. All plugins
set this to a unique string to identify the plugin type.
- medm displays
- Added new top-level detector-specific displays for Prosilica (prosilica.adl),
Firewire (firewire.adl), and simDetector (simDetector.adl).
ADBase.adl should no longer be used for these cameras.
- Viewers
- Added new ImageJ plugin viewer. This was begun by Tim Madden from APS, and now
includes support for all NDArray data types and color modes, i.e. Mono, RGB1 (pixel
interleave), RGB2 (row interleave) and RGB3 (plane interleave). The plugin directory
includes a plugin written elsewhere for reading and writing netCDF files, so ImageJ
can be used to display images and image sequences (movies) saved with the NDFileNetCDF
plugin. It also includes a dynamic profile plugin written elsewhere for line profiles
that update in real time as new images are displayed.
- Improved IDL epics_ad_display viewer. The last image is now stored in the program,
and it is now redisplayed if the view mode is changed (TVSCL to iimage, etc.) or
if the display parameters are changed (autoscale, flip Y, minimum, maximum, etc.).
- Documentation
- Documented the source code with comments that doxygen can process to produce HTML
documentation directly from the source. This provides documentation for each class,
as well as the class inheritance tree. Thanks to John Hammonds for starting this.
- Internals
- Moved the asynPortDriver base C++ class from the areaDetector module to the asyn
module. The asynPortDriver base class was modified slightly to make it more general.
In particular the constructor no longer hardcodes ASYN_CANBLOCK, ASYN_MULTIDEVICE,
epicsThreadPriorityMedium, and epicsThreadStackMedium. This requires that asyn R4-11
or later be used, and requires 2 additional arguments to the constructor (priority
and stackSize) for all areaDetector drivers and plugins.
- Removed mutexId from asynPortDriver base class, and added lock() and unlock()
methods. This hides the implementation of the locking, since we might want to implement
these with asynManager->lockPort in the future.
- Removed the file ADStdParams.h. Moved the definition of parameters that are general
to NDArray drivers into asynNDArrayDriver.h, and those that are specific to areaDetector
drivers into ADDriver.h.
- Added an XML parser which is used for attribute definition files.
- Fixed Makefiles to instantiate templates on vxWorks.
- Moved createFileName() from ADDriver and NDPluginDriver to their base class, asynNDArrayDriver.
- Changed colorMode and bayerPattern from being properties of NDArray to being attributes,
since they are not general to NDArray but are specific to areaDetector.
- Added new method asynPortDriver::drvUserCreateParam, which simplifies drvUserCreate
code in all drivers and plugins.
- Reduced number of files for all plugins and drivers. Previously there was an XXX.cpp,
drvXXX.h, and drvXXXEpics.c. The .h and .c files were used to keep the drivers and
plugins independent of EPICS IOC code. It was decided that that extra 2 files per
driver and plugin were not worth the added complexity. If it is desired to run drivers
and plugins outside of an IOC it could be done with conditional compilation of the
IOC dependent code, which is all at the end of the .cpp file. The iocsh commands
to create plugins have been changed from drvNDxxxConfigure to NDxxxConfigure, for
example drvNDStdArraysConfigure was changed to NDStdArraysConfigure. This requires
changes to all st.cmd files.
- Renamed a few parameters and the drvInfo strings to logically separate things
that are general to NDArrays and things that are specific to area detectors. For
example, the drvInfo fields IMAGE_SIZE_xxx were renamed to ARRAY_SIZE_xxx, and IMAGE_COUNTER
was renamed to ARRAY_COUNTER.
- Added call to epicsExit() to all driver IOC main programs. This is important for
allowing EPICS to exit cleanly. Without this on Linux it was often necessary to
kill the IOC with ^C, rather than just typing "exit".
- NDStdArrays.template had the DTYP field of the waveform record changed from asynInt$(SIZE)ArrayIn
to asyn$(TYPE)ArrayIn. This was needed to allow it to be used with asynFloat32 and
asynFloat64 data types. This requires a change to all iocBoot st.cmd files that
load this template file.
- Plugins can now add attributes to an NDArray, which means they can modify the
array and hence need to make a copy of it. This requires that NDArray->release()
must be called in the plugin itself, rather than in the NDPluginDriver base class
as was done previously.
Release 1-4 (30-January-2009)
- Added a driver for Roper Scientific (i.e. Princeton Instruments and Photometrics)
detectors. It uses the Microsoft COM interface to control the WinView or WinSpec
programs. The previous support in the "ccd" module used a Visual Basic socket server
and an SNL program to accomplish this. It was hard to maintain, because Visual Basic
changed incompatibly from one release of Visual Studio to the next, and because
it could not be built with the EPICS build system. The new driver is written in
C++, and is built entirely with the EPICS build system. It also supports more WinView
features than the ccd version, and makes the detector data available via callbacks.
This allows detector data to be displayed with EPICS clients, permits ROI or other
plugin calculations, and allows saving in other file formats if desired.
- Added support for color:
- Added NDColorMode_t and NDBayerPattern_t to NDArray.h. Added new fields colorMode
and bayerPattern to NDArray structure to indicate the color mode.
- Added new parameter ADColorMode to ADStdDriverParams.h and new record ColorMode
to ADBase.template.
- Added new parameter NDColorMode and NDBayerPattern to NDPluginBase.h and new records
ColorMode and BayerPattern to NDPluginBase.template. Added these records to all
plugin medm screens.
- Added a new plugin NDPluginColorConvert to convert colors. It currently converts
Bayer to RGB1, RGB2 or RGB3, RGB1 to RGB2 or RGB3 and RGB3 to RGB1 or RGB2.
- The Prosilica driver now supports color. It supports RGB1 and Bayer directly,
and RGB2 and RGB3 through the NDPluginColorConvert plugin.
- The NDPluginFile driver now saves the ColorMode and BayerPattern to the netCDF
files.
- Added a Viewers directory. This contains an IDL viewer for displaying images.
The viewer supports color and several different viewing modes. It can be run for
free under the IDL Virtual Machine, and should work on any platform with a version
of ezcaIDL.so or ezcaIDL.dll built with EPICS 3.14. This directory also contains
IDL class libraries for accessing areaDetector. These classes are used by the viewers,
but can also be used for other IDL applications.
- Added new parameters in ADStdDriverParams.h
- ADTemperature
- ADReadStatus
- ADImageSizeZ
- ADNumExposuresCounter
- ADColorMode
- ADPortNameSelf
- Pilatus driver
- Send the imgpath command to camserver when the ADFilePath parameter is changed.
camserver will then create directories if they do not exist, whereas specifying
a path with non-existant directories in the "exposure" or acquire commands will
not create directories.
- Prosilica driver
- Added support for color.
- Added support for the external sync in, sync out and strobe signals. The sync
signals can also be used for general-purpose digital I/O.
- Made minor changes to the code and to the build system to add support for running
the driver under Linux. There are some issues with this drivers use of SIGARLM via
Posix Timer library and EPICS signal handlers. I have made some minor modifications
to EPICS base 3.14.10 to allow the IOC to run. Prosilica is working on a new version
of their driver that should fix these issues, but it is not yet working. The prebuilt
binary version of this release of areaDetector includes the fixes to EPICS base
and does work satisfactorily.
- NDPluginROI
- Fixed bug with missing roi argument to setIntegerParam call, some parameters not
updating correctly.
- Added maxBuffers argument to constructor and to iocsh configuration command. This
was a serious oversight in the previous versions. maxROIs was being used where the
missing maxBuffers parameter should have been used. Unfortunately it requires a
new argument to the iocsh drvNDROIConfigure command, which is not backwards compatible
with previous startup scripts.
- NDArray
- Changed the NDArray::copy() methods to NDArrayPool::copy(). Previously the copy
was being allocated from the NDArrayPool of the copy source, rather than from the
caller's array pool.
- Added colorMode and bayerPattern fields to NDArray class.
- Fixed a bug in the NDArray::convertDim function that could cause an array bounds
error if a dimension was reversed.
- asynPortDriver
- Renamed the pasynUser member to pasynUserSelf. This avoids a name conflict with
the local variable pasynUser used in many derived classes. Unfortunately this requires
changes to derived class code where this->pasynUser was used.
- Added simulation code to ADSC driver. This allows it to be built and tested on
systems that do not have the ADSC hardware or software installed.
- Added $(P)$(R)AutoSave to the save/restore settings in NDFile_settings.req so
it will be restored on reboot. This requires care when using drivers such as the
Prosilica which can rapidly save very large data files, since file saving may be
resumed on reboot.
- Removed abusy record, replaced with new version of busy record from new busy module.
- Renamed ADPlugin library to NDPlugin, because it is really N-dimensional.
- Renamed marCCD library to marCCD_AD, because marCCD is already used in the ccd
module, and it conflicts. Changed marCCDSupport.dbd to marCCD_ADSupport.dbd, name
of register command, etc.
- Added PortName_RBV record to ADBase.template and NDPluginBase.template and to
all driver and plugin medm screens. This allows the user to see the asyn port name
of the driver or plugin, which is useful when switching the NDArray callback source.
- Modified the detector medm screens to contain links to the plugins that are normally
loaded for that driver, e.g. a single instance each of NDStdArrays, NDROI, NDFile
and NDColorConvert (for detectors that support color).
Release 1-3 (24-November-2008)
- Added a driver for MarCCD detectors. Compared to the previous support in the "ccd"
module, this driver uses the faster Version 1 protocol for the Mar server. It also
makes the detector data available via callbacks (by reading the TIFF files as soon
as they are written). This allows detector data to be displayed with EPICS clients,
and for ROI calculations.
- Added support for shutter control. Supports shutters that are driven directly
from the detector hardware, as well as shutters controlled by EPICS records. Shutter
support is implemented for the MarCCD, Pilatus, and simulation detectors.
- Added new methods for shutter support to the detector base class ADDriver.cpp
- ADDriver::setShutter()
- ADDriver::writeInt32
- Reorganized the file I/O parameters, template files and medm screens
- Moved the file capture parameters from NDPluginFile.h and NDPluginFile.cpp to
ADStdDriverParams.h. This allows a detector driver to use these capture parameters
if desired.
- Removed all of the file I/O records from ADBase.template and ADBase_settings.req.
These previously duplicated the records in NDFile.template and NDFile_settings.req,
which was hard to maintain. IOCs for detector drivers that can do file I/O now need
to load NDFile.template, while those that cannot no longer need to load these records.
They also need to have NDFile_settings.req added to auto_settings.req. This does
not effect the file plugin support, only drivers that directly do file I/O.
- Removed the file I/O PVs from ADBase.adl. Added a related display link to NDFile.adl.
- NDFile.adl now contains only the file related PVs, not the plugin related PVs.
The new file NDPluginFile.adl replaces the previous version of NDFile.adl, and contains
both the file PVs and the plugin PVs.
- Added new enums in ADStdDriverParams.h
- ADFrameType_t
- ADShutterMode_t
- ADFileMode_t
- Added new parameters in ADStdDriverParams.h
- ADShutterControl (replaces ADShutter)
- ADShutterControlEPICS
- ADShutterStatus
- ADShutterMode
- ADShutterOpenDelay
- ADShutterCloseDelay
- ADTimeRemaining
- ADNumImagesCounter
- ADFrameType
- ADArrayCallbacks
- ADFileWriteMode
- ADFileNumCapture
- ADFileNumCaptured
- ADFileCapture
ADArrayCallbacks can be set to 0 to disable callbacks with detector data. For the
MarCCD and Pilatus detectors setting this to 0 will disable reading the disk files
after collection. This can be used to reduce overhead when EPICS is being used just
for control, rather than to access the data.
- Added variant of NDPluginDriver::createFileName that returns the filePath and
fileName separately, rather than a complete file name including the path.
Release 1-2 (24-October-2008)
- Major update to documentation
- Significant enhancement to ROI plugin. Added net counts, ROI highlighting.
- Added driver for Pilatus detectors. This has undergone limited testing.
- Added driver for ADSC detectors (done by Lewis Muir, IMCA-CAT)
- Removed separate readback parameters in drivers and template files
- Changed from mbbi/mbbo records to bi/bo records where possible now that the asynInt32
interface supports bi/bo records.
- Internals
- Renamed asynParamBase to asynPortDriver.
- Renamed NDArrayBase to NDArrayDriver
- Renamed NDPluginBase to NDPluginDriver
- Renamed NDArrayBuff to NDArrayPool, now in NDArray.cpp.
- Renamed ADDriverBase to ADDriver
- Removed ADUtils
- The asynHandle interface in asyn was renamed to asynGenericPointer, many changes
to incorporate this.
- Base class constructor no longer initializes all asyn interfaces, only the selected
ones.
- NDArray pool is no longer global, each server creates its own pool if needed.
- Implemented real routines for writeInt32, writeFloat64, and writeOctet in asynPortDriver.cpp,
removed them from ADDriver.cpp where they were not needed.
Release 1-1 (10-May-2008)
- Major rewrite. Converted device drivers and plugins from C to C++ with C++ base
classes that handle many of the details of asyn and of callbacks and threading for
plugins.
- Everything except device drivers and top-level EPICS databases and channel access
clients are now fully N-dimensional, not restricted to 2-D.
- NDPluginFile now uses netCDF format, which is a portable self-describing binary
file format.
- Added NDPluginROI which implements region-of-interest.
Release 1-0 (11-Apr-2008)
- Initial release, still many things remaining to be done.
Suggestions and Comments to:
Mark Rivers : (rivers@cars.uchicago.edu)