What is Acquaman?

Acquaman is a development framework designed to help synchrotron programmers deliver excellent interface software to synchrotron users.

Designed to support ACQUisition and data MANagement, the Acquaman framework provides a comprehensive suite of tools for acquiring, storing, managing, and visualizing data from synchrotron experiments. To achieve these goals the framework also includes considerable support for beamline control, data analysis, and automation.

The Acquaman framework has been used to deploy applications on four beamline at the Canadian Light Source with more applications under development. The framework is programmed in C++ using Qt as the principle backbone. Although the framework is sufficiently general to handle just about any control system or beamline, the bulk of the development to date has targeted EPICS and common CLS implementations of motors and equipment.

Why Acquaman?

The Acquaman framework has been developed with the expressed interest of making life better for synchrotron users and synchrotron programmers.

We believe that synchrotron users benefit directly from user interface software that places an emphasis on science instead of the control of the beamline. At the same time, synchrotron users should expect software that is easy to use and presents information in a timely fashion. Synchrotron users run around the clock, sometimes with limited support from beamline staff, so it must be robust and reliable.

We also believe that synchrotron programmers should benefit from a robust and reliable framework. The world of scientific programming is inherently event driven and the Acquaman framework takes full advantage of Qt to make this possible for both user interface tools and control tools. The intention of the framework, from a programmer point of view, is to maximum the use of common elements but still enable programmers to make excellent custom implementations for their particular needs. Our experience is that general tools are passable for a broad range of needs but seldom, if ever, really excel at solving particular problems; the Acquaman framework is our effort to address this problem.

How to get involved in Acquaman?

Feel free to fork and play with the repository if you like. You can contact anyone in the group using Github and the Acquaman Dashboard will likely show you who’s active in the group right now. If you want to be involved in the project more directly, you’ll need to contact David Chevrier or Darren Hunter .