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Acquisition Tutorial

Under construction

The dedicated acquisition tutorial in this tab is a stub. For now, the canonical end-to-end walkthrough lives at Scanner GUI → Tutorial — Your First Scan. It covers the same ground this stub will eventually expand into: configuring an experiment, building a save element, running a NOSCAN, running a 1D scan, and finding the resulting data on disk.

Why this page exists

The analysis tutorial covers the analysis half of the data lifecycle end-to-end. The acquisition half is currently documented inside the Scanner GUI tab because that's where the GUI itself is documented; it predates the Tutorials tab.

When the acquisition tutorial is written here it'll be more comprehensive than the existing Scanner GUI tutorial — covering optimization scans, multi-scanner batches, action sequences, composite scan variables, and the back-and-forth between Scanner GUI and the live analysis side. Until then, the existing Scanner GUI tutorial is the right starting point.

What the proper version will cover (roughly)

A non-exhaustive sketch, so the eventual writer has a starting outline:

  1. Setup — config.ini, experiment selection, talking to the GEECS database.
  2. Save elements — building one from scratch, composing multiple, the setup_action / closeout_action hooks.
  3. NOSCAN — your first scan, where the data lands, sanity-checks.
  4. 1D scan — picking a scan variable, ranges and steps, composite scan variables.
  5. Multi-scanner — queuing a batch of scans with different configurations.
  6. Optimization scans — Xopt-driven scans with a custom evaluator.
  7. Pre/post-scan action sequences — calibration shots, shutter handling, "leave it as you found it" closeouts.
  8. Operations — what to check when something goes wrong, how the structured logs pair with the /triage skill.

Until then