Speaker
Description
Modern beamlines and experimental endstations frequently require rapid integration of heterogeneous devices, ad-hoc analysis pipelines, and temporary control-system extensions. While large facility frameworks provide robust infrastructure, researchers and instrument scientists often still face the practical challenge of connecting new detectors, processing live data streams, or exposing derived quantities to existing control environments under severe time constraints.
CAmagick addresses this gap through a lightweight, modular, command-line driven framework for data acquisition, transformation, visualization, and redistribution. Originally focused on EPICS Channel Access environments, the framework is evolving toward protocol-agnostic interoperability, including Tango, Ophyd, HDF5 and Zarr backends. The project targets “Monday-morning integration” scenarios: rapid deployment of functionality, extending the existing beamline infrastructure without requiring extensive engineering effort.
The framework models acquisition workflows as continuously executing pipelines composed of sources, transformation nodes, sinks, and flow-control structures. Users can construct complex real-time workflows directly from the command line or YAML recipes, such as ROI extraction, numerical processing, live plotting, HDF5/Zarr persistence, and publication of derived quantities as EPICS process variables. The same abstractions are available both interactively and through a Python API, enabling seamless migration to reusable workflows.
A key design goal is minimizing the barrier between experimental idea and operational deployment. Typical use cases include detector
prototyping, protocol bridging, rapid IOC creation, online monitoring.
