eco — Experiment Control

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 Experiment Control   \__/\__/\___/

eco is a Python-based control environment for experiments, developed and used at SwissFEL, PSI. It is used both as:

• a library of experimental devices for higher-level Python applications or GUIs, and
• an interactive command-line interface, e.g. from an IPython/Jupyter shell or notebook.

eco follows an object-oriented approach: every device is represented as a Python object with a small, predictable interface, so devices can be freely combined in generic control/acquisition routines and analysed with the scientific Python ecosystem. For a general introduction to object-oriented Python, see e.g. this short introduction.

Documentation

The full documentation — installation, core concepts, and worked examples (listening monitors, archiver data and strip charts, pipeline offload, motor configuration) — lives in docs/ and is built with Sphinx, configured to build on Read the Docs via .readthedocs.yaml.

Build it locally:

pip install -r docs/requirements.txt
sphinx-build -b html docs docs/_build/html

Installation

conda install -c paulscherrerinstitute eco

or, for development, in editable mode from a checkout:

git clone https://github.com/paulscherrerinstitute/eco.git
cd eco
pip install -e .

See Installation for beamline-specific setup (the eco launcher, .ecorc defaults) and the full dependency picture.

Creating a new device

New devices are implemented as a subclass of Assembly, which provides naming, aliasing, and shell representation:

from eco.elements.assembly import Assembly

class MyDevice(Assembly):
    def __init__(self, name=None):
        super().__init__(name=name)
        self._append(MySubObject, name="my_sub_object", is_setting=True, is_status=True)

is_setting=True marks the child as a setting of the assembly (shown by .settings() and captured when settings are saved); is_status=True marks it as contributing to the assembly's .status(). See Representing real devices — the Assembly in the full docs for the rest of the model (Adjustable, Detector, Namespace) and a from-scratch, runnable example of each.