How can I control many detectors in parallel or independently?

For most users the detector will be composed by a single module. Therefore all configurations of the detector will refere to that single entity.

However, for some experiments it is necessary to concatenate the data from several detector controllers, and sometimes (e.g. MYTHEN) each controller can control many modules. This should be transparent to the user since most parameters will be identical for all controllers (e.g. exposure time, energy threshold etc.), except for the configurations specific to the controller (e.g. hardware configuration).
In principle it is possible to combine controllers of different type (e.g. MYTHEN, GOTTHARD, EIGER) but the user should then evaluate if it really makes sense to control such different systems in parallel.

In other cases, several SLS detectors will independently acquire data during the same experiment. In this case it will be necessary to be able to seperately control them.

The detectors can be controlled in parallel from several PCs (clients). However it is important the the configurations match on all of the them such that no conflict arise. Eventually a detector can be locked to a specific control PC, still different users interfaces (command line, GUI) can be used in parallel.

A sketch of a possible complex detector configuration is shown in figure 1.1

For this reason and index is assigned to each detector. If a single detector is used, as in most cases, the index will be omitted and defaults to 0.
To control the other detectors the index cannot be omitted!

An index will also be assigned to each controller within a detector. However the user normally will not need to address single controllers, except for the most advanced settings which can be left to configuration files.

Finally each module within a controller has an internal index. However in general it is not required that the user is aware of the system architecture and, if needed (rarely), the modules can simply be addressed sequentially starting from controller 0.

Figure 1.1: Scketch of a possible complex system architecture composed of several detector, each consisting in many controllers eventually controlling several modules.