title: JBluIce-EPICS control system for macromolecular crystallography.
abstract: The trio of macromolecular crystallography beamlines constructed by the General Medicine and Cancer Institutes Collaborative Access Team (GM/CA-CAT) in Sector 23 of the Advanced Photon Source (APS) have been in growing demand owing to their outstanding beam quality and capacity to measure data from crystals of only a few micrometres in size. To take full advantage of the state-of-the-art mechanical and optical design of these beamlines, a significant effort has been devoted to designing fast, convenient, intuitive and robust beamline controls that could easily accommodate new beamline developments. The GM/CA-CAT beamline controls are based on the power of EPICS for distributed hardware control, the rich Java graphical user interface of Eclipse RCP and the task-oriented philosophy as well as the look and feel of the successful SSRL BluIce graphical user interface for crystallography. These beamline controls feature a minimum number of software layers, the wide use of plug-ins that can be written in any language and unified motion controls that allow on-the-fly scanning and optimization of any beamline component. This paper describes the ways in which BluIce was combined with EPICS and converted into the Java-based JBluIce, discusses the solutions aimed at streamlining and speeding up operations and gives an overview of the tools that are provided by this new open-source control system for facilitating crystallographic experiments, especially in the field of microcrystallography.
authors.affiliation: GM/CA-CAT at the APS, Biosciences Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, Illinois 60439, USA. sstepanov@anl.gov
authors.forename: Sergey
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Stepanov
authors.forename: Oleg
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Makarov
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Hilgart
authors.forename: Sudhir Babu
authors.initials: SB
authors.lastname: Pothineni
authors.forename: Alex
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Urakhchin
authors.forename: Satish
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Devarapalli
authors.forename: Derek
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Yoder
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Becker
authors.forename: Craig
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Ogata
authors.forename: Ruslan
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Sanishvili
authors.forename: Nagarajan
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Venugopalan
authors.forename: Janet L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Smith
authors.forename: Robert F
authors.initials: RF
authors.lastname: Fischetti
mesh_terms: D018360:Crystallography, X-Ray / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*; D012984:Software