Acquisition software state and future goals

The ESRF acquisition software is currently being migrated from the previous control system called SPEC, to the new inhouse control system called Bliss (documentation here). Bliss comes as a python library, and it requires the existing acquisition software and sequences to be translated.

Previous acquisition software solutions

Currently, at the ESRF, numerous codes and solutions exist for the acquisition of tomographic data (similar situation to data processing). Over time, each beamline (in some cases, for different techniques on the same beamline) has adopted different solutions for the acquisition of tomographic data.

The differences are due to one or more of the following reasons:

• Type of collected data.
• Data collection modalities.
• Approach taken by the different BCU contacts and beamline scientists.
• Existing hardware and design limitations on the beamlines.
• Level of control and complexity required by the operators.

The diversity of the existing codes requires large amounts of resources for the development and maintenance of the acquisition routines.

Goal of the tomo-bridge developments

In the framework of the tomography bridge, one of the goals is to unify the acquisition software. Bliss does already a step in the correct direction by providing basic tools that were not previously available in SPEC. However, the "tout court" translation of existing codes to Bliss would repropose most of the current problems down the line. For this reason it is advisable that BCU, together with the tomography bridge, unifies the future tomography acquisition software.