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

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.