Overview of xpd acquisition environment

All experiments will be carried out in the pe2_data/xpdUser directory tree.

At the beginning of beamtime, users will be presented with a standard set of directories inside pe2_data/xpdUser. The directories and their purpose are shown in the table below.

All the directories will be empty initially. However, users can place predefined files, which helps to accelerate the experiments, in Import directory. Normally this file will be generated by running a simulated experiment using xpdAcq. If these files do not exist, that is not a problem. But, there will be much more typing when setting up the metadata during beamtime.

Once the directories are set-up, the experiment is run by typing xpdui which places you into an ipython session. The available commands and workflow are described under For XPD Users.

Table of directories and their uses:

Directory Name	Contents
Import	Here, users place pre-populated Sample spreadsheet(.xlsx) pre-made files user scripts (.py), detector-image mask files (.npy), files containing xpdAcq objects (extension .yml) or an archived file made of mix of them. The user can use import_userScriptsEtc to unpack and import those files.
config_base	This contains the calibration parameters, config file and mask file used by xPDFsuite and xpdacq. Only the programs should write in this directory. Users are advised to not edit or add anything to this directory.
tiff_base	This is where all the image files (.tif) are stored and can be extracted from the database using databroker library during the experiment.
userScripts	This is a handy space where the users can write their own experiment scripts and save them. They will be bundled up at the end of the experiment so that the user can take them
userAnalysis	Users can create any sets of directories under here for storing analysis files (e.g those saved by xPDFsuite).
…	In fact, users can create any directories and files they want. This is because at the end of beamtime, they will be bundled, tarred and zipped as to be taken home.

For detailed information, proceed to XPD user section