The terminal tweaks wait for keys in a blocking select/sleep loop on the main thread, which starved the Qt event loop for the whole tweak: live plots and camera viewers froze until q. wait_input() now waits the way the IPython prompt does, by running the active GUI input hook until stdin is readable, or pumping an existing QApplication every 20 ms when there is no hook. Key handling is unchanged.
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.