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Controls

The Zebra position-capture trigger, the motion controllers, and the seam between CORA and the floor.

Triggering: the Zebra

SRX uses a Zebra FPGA position-capture box (Zebra1, XF:05IDD-ES:1{Dev:Zebra1}:) to hardware-gate the per-point detector triggers during a fly XRF raster, the same position-compare role at FXI (Aerotech PSO), HXN, and 2-BM. A second Zebra2 is also present (ZEBRA-1).

Motion controllers

The nano-stage and KB motion controllers drive the raster and focusing axes. Their box models, firmware, and IPs are not in the profile collection (DRIVE-1), so EndstationMotionController is carried as a MotionController family with the specifics blank.

The seam: CORA and the floor

This is where CORA's design meets the SRX floor. The shape matches the other NSLS-II beamlines'.

CORA owns (its conducting engine, over the ControlPort):

  • the scan orchestration: the fly XRF raster (and the XANES energy sweep, and the XRF-tomography raster x rotation), hardware-gated per point by the Zebra, reading the technique's detector(s).
  • the choice of which technique/detector to run, gated by the trust boundary.

CORA drives through (the floor it actuates and observes, and does not replace):

  • the EPICS IOCs via the ophyd hardware abstraction: the ControlPort boundary;
  • the Zebra position-compare gating, the HDCM Bragg drive and feedback, the KB and nano-stage closed-loop feedback (FPS / PICOSCALE interferometers), the PSS/PPS interlock, and the detector IOCs;
  • the facility filestore where the per-scan data lands. CORA moves it, over the TransferPort, into CORA's own Dataset of record.

So CORA brings one conducting engine to SRX, working over the ports: scan orchestration over the ControlPort, any reconstruction/fitting (XRF fitting, ptychography, tomography) over the ComputePort, and data egress over the TransferPort into the CORA Dataset.

The software IOCs (Xspress3, Merlin, Dexela, Eiger, PCO, Zebra, Struck, Qmini) are referenced by PV namespace only, never registered as Assets.