This talk will focus on enhancements to the areaDetector package since it was last presented at the 2016 collaboration meeting at Oak Ridge. These include:
- New ImageJ plugin called EPICS_NTNDA_Viewer.java that displays images using EPICS V4 NTNDArrays. It has the same functionality as the EPICS_AD_Viewer.java which uses EPICS Channel Access to display images in waveform records. EPICS V4 is a much better solution, since it transmits the images and metadata atomically over the network. It also allows dynamically changing the dimensions and datatype of the array, and does not require setting EPICS_CA_MAX_ARRAY_BYTES, which is a frequent source of problems for users.
- New ImageJ plugin called EPICS_AD_Controller.java. This plugin allows using the ImageJ ROI tools (rectangle and oval) to graphically define: the readout region of the detector/camera; the position and size of an ROI (NDPluginROI); the position and size of an overlay (NDPluginOverlay). The plugin chain can include an NDPluginTransform plugin which changes the image orientation and an NDPluginROI plugin that changes the binning, size, and X/Y axes directions. The plugin corrects for these transformations when defining the target object.
- Added support for multiple threads running the processCallbacks() function in a single plugin. This improves the performance of the plugin by a large factor. Linear scaling with up to 5 threads (the largest value tested) was observed for most of the plugins that now support multiple threads. The maximum number of threads that can be used for the plugin is set in the constructor and thus in the IOC startup script. The actual number of threads to use can be controlled via an EPICS PV at run time, up to the maximum value passed to the constructor. All of the standard plugins for which multiple threads are helpful and feasible now support this.
- Added new Scatter and Gather plugins for parallel processing of NDArrays with multiple instances of a single plugin type. This is similar to the multiple threads support described above, except that it allows each plugin instance to have different settings.
- Added support for GraphicsMagick in ADSupport so NDFileMagick and the NDURL driver can now run on Windows and Linux with no external libraries.
- Added support for the blosc filter library with the HDF5 file plugin, providing additional compression options.
- Added support for the new PhotonII detector from Bruker.
The talk will also present the results from the working group meeting to be held on October 5 at ITER.
