## 4 Results
### A Customized and Fully Integrated Q-Range Planner  
Instrument-specific experiment planning is important for the success of an experiment. For SANS experiments, Q-range is one of the most critical factors, as it determines the size range of a measurement. Previously, instrument scientists developed spreadsheets or other calculation tools independently to do their planning without much instrument-specific information or constraints. The integration of the Q-Range Planning tool within the ICDAS enables the direct transfer of the Q-range configuration from the planning stage to the measurement stage. In addition to the benefit of imposing the physical constraints (e.g., motor limits) of a specific instrument, this implementation reduces the number of Q-range configurations that are due to small, unnecessary inconsistencies.  
Once we understood these requirements, a customized Q-Range Planner was developed based on instrument scientists' spreadsheet calculators, as well as previous work on other instruments. The SANS Q-Range Planner helps users specify/update factors such as wavelength, attenuation factor, number of guides, aperture sizes, detector distance/rotation, distance offsets, and beam trap configuration for both scattering and transmission measurements. The factors then are converted into actual hardware settings such as motor positions. The planner then calculates the minimum Q at the beam stop rim, depending on the beam  
Figure 4: An example of motor grouping, the pseudo-motors for guide operation in the collimation system.  
Figure 5: The diagram shows that the sample-to-detector distance combines the sample-to-silicon window offset and the actual detector motor position to form a controllable pseudo-motor.  
stop chosen, maximum Q values at corners and edges on each detector, and direct beam size on the detector; and, when applicable, it calculates the overlapping ratios between different detectors. Users can easily save a Q-range configuration to use and reuse in actual measurements. The saved Q configuration is in a human-readable text file format.  
The SANS Q-Range Planner is deployed among the instrument suite. At different instruments, the calculation incorporates different instrument component details (e.g., detector, collimator, and beam trap details) but with an almost identical high-level interface for users (Figure 6). We also added beam center enhancement so users could more accurately calculate Q-ranges based on the specified beam center on the 2D display, instead of always pretending the beam center is at the previous physical detector center. The beam center coordination and calculated Q-range details are captured in each Q configuration file, reused at the run time for live displays (see Section 4.4), and saved in each data file to be used by the data reduction software. To meet the different needs and access privileges of external users and instrument scientists, two instances of the Q-Range Planner are running on each instrument. One is dedicated to use by instrument scientists to establish new standard configurations. The other is embedded within Panel Scans (see Section 4.3) to flexibly deal with sample- or experiment-dependent minor modifications, as well as to collect data with more than one Q-range configuration. Q-range configurations can also be easily set like a simple variable by using other user operation interfaces such as Scripting Tool and the generic Table Scan. With Q-Range configurations generated by the planner, a soft matter simulator (Figure S7) has been developed for generating typical model scattering curves with realistic instrument factors such as flux at different neutron guide numbers, Q resolutions, etc., to further aid users to plan an experiment.