# Presentation: 106477

## Materials Science and

**Protein Crystallography**
**Using the MX**
**Beamline Control Toolkit**

- William M. Lavender

*http://www.imca.aps.anl.gov/mx/*
*lavender@imca.aps.anl.gov*

*Illinois Institute of Technology*
*Chicago, Illinois 60616*

## Plan of the Talk

- Review of MX
- XIA multichannel analyzer support
- MCS quick scan support
- Performance
- Protein crystallography
- New beamlines
- MX as device support for EPICS

## What is MX?

- A portable beamline control toolkit:  *Linux, Solaris, Irix, Windows, MacOS X, Cygwin, etc.*
- Designed as middleware.
- Comes with a set of servers and clients.
- Has an extensive set of device drivers:						53 motor and pseudomotor drivers,							with over 250 drivers altogether.
- Easy to interface to other people's drivers.
- Easy to embed in other applications and servers.

## Current Users of MX

- MR-CAT, APS Sector 10-ID								*materials science*
- IMCA-CAT, APS Sector 17-ID and 17-BM					*macromolecular crystallography*
- SER-CAT, APS Sector 22-ID and 22-BM						*macromolecular crystallography*
- DND-CAT, APS Sector 5-BM								*macromolecular crystallography*
- GCPCC, CAMD											*macromolecular crystallography*

## MX Portability

- Beamlines using only EPICS-controlled devices.
- Beamlines that do not use EPICS at all.
- Beamlines with a mix of EPICS and non-EPICS devices.
- Beamlines using other network protocols like SCIPE.
- Beamlines using vendor provided Windows DLLs.

- MX provides a way to write beamline applications that
- are independent of the underlying control system.

- MX has been used with:

## XIA Multichannel Analyzer Support

- MX now supports the DXP-2X and Saturn  MCAs from X-ray Instrumentation Associates.
- DXP-2X: A CAMAC-based MCA with 4 MCA channels per module.
- Saturn (X10P): A parallel port-based MCA.
- A Windows 98-based MX server controls the MCAs via the XIA-provided Xerxes library.
- The DXP-2X has been used by MRCAT at input count rates of up to 1.5 million counts per second per channel.

## MCS Quick Scans

- MX now supports quick scans that use a multichannel scaler to buffer the data.
- Struck SIS 3801 is supported via either EPICS or directly.
- The SIS 3801 sample interval ranges from 1 μsec to 1.67 sec using its internal clock.
- It can record up to 128 K samples that can be divided between scalers as necessary.
- When used via EPICS, each scaler can have up to 4000 measurements.
- When used directly, there is no limit other than the FIFO size.

## MCS Quick Scans (cont.)

- At MR-CAT, most XAFS and diffraction measurements not using an MCA are now done via quick scans.
- SER-CAT and IMCA-CAT plan to use quick scans to minimize radiation damage to crystallography samples.
- Quick scans can also use an external pulse generator as a clock instead of the internal MCS clock.
- The XIA DXP-2X MCA now has support for internal buffering of region of interest (ROI) integrals.
- MR-CAT plans to use this to measure up to 208 MCA ROI integrals per point of a quick scan.

## Performance

- MX development until recently has focused on implementing necessary beamline functionality.
- Now we need to improve the performance of the control system.
- The biggest improvements are likely to be found by improving the efficiency of network communication.
- We plan to focus on improving network performance over the next several months.
- We will also explore using MX drivers in an EPICS Channel Access server.
- Perceived performance of user interfaces is also important.

## Protein Crystallography with MX

- Wavelength control
- Slit and filter control
- Fluorescence scans
- MAD experiment setup
- Beamline intensity optimization
- Vendor goniostat and beamline interfaces for Mar, ADSC, and Bruker.

- MX has fairly mature support for protein crystallography
- related beamline control:

## Imcagui Main Window

## MAD Experiments with Imcagui

## New Beamlines

- MX is now in use at several new beamlines:					SER-CAT, DND-CAT, and GCPCC.
- Most of my recent crystallography development has been done for SER-CAT.
- DND-CAT and GCPCC have been relatively self supporting.

## MX at SER-CAT

- SER-CAT is using Delta Tau Turbo PMACs for motor control.
- Struck VME modules are used for counter/timer support through PCI-to-VME bus interfaces.
- EPICS is only used for undulator control.
- Implemented distance, angle, and offset pseudomotors for the A-frame CCD detector support.
- Implemented MX pseudodevices for downstream BPM readout.
- Implemented beamline and goniostat interfaces for the MarCCD and Bruker Proteum CCD systems.
- SER-CAT is now making plans for increased beamline automation.

## SER-CAT A-frame Detector Support

## Future Plans for Crystallography

- Interfacing to robotic sample changing systems.
- Closer integration with area detector control systems.
- Batch mode sample processing.
- Remote control of data acquisition across the Internet.

## MX as EPICS Device Support

- MX is designed to be easily embeddable in other applications or servers.
- EPICS IocCore has now been ported to Linux, Solaris, Win32 and RTEMS, but few device drivers exist yet.
- I plan to use the MX library and drivers as device support for EPICS.
- Code to use MX motor drivers from the EPICS motor record is currently under development.
- This will let MEDM be used to construct MX GUIs.
- It will also allow MX drivers to be used from Spec.

## Acknowledgements

- A. Howard		IMCA-CAT, IIT
- L. Keefe		IMCA-CAT, IIT
- I. Koshelev		IMCA-CAT, IIT
- C. Segre		MR-CAT, IIT
- J. Terry		MR-CAT, IIT
- J. Kropf		MR-CAT, Argonne
- H. Tostmann		MR-CAT, U. Florida
- B. Bunker		MR-CAT, Notre Dame
- J. Fait			SER-CAT, U. Georgia
- J. Chrzas		SER-CAT, U. Georgia
- N. Leyarovska	SER-CAT, U. Georgia
- G. Rosenbaum	SER-CAT, U. Georgia

- J. Quintana		DND-CAT, Northwestern
- S. Weigand		DND-CAT, Northwestern
- H. Bellamy		GCPCC, CAMD
- M. White		GCPCC, UTMB
- G. Bunker		IIT
- R. Alkire		SBC-CAT, Argonne
- K. Lazarski		SBC-CAT, Argonne
- T. Mooney		APS, Argonne
- R. Sluiter		APS, Argonne
- E. Westbrook		MBC
- R. Fischetti		GMCA-CAT
- S. Stepanov		GMCA-CAT