ndscan extends the ARTIQ real-time
laboratory control system with the concept of fragments – building blocks that
accept parameters and produce result data – and tools for productively working
with experiments consisting of many such parts. In particular, ndscan allows
users to easily override parameters from anywhere in the system on the fly, and
to acquire data by iterating over (“scanning”) any number of them at a time.
See the documentation for more information.
ndscan is beta-grade software. While the system has been carefully
architected and the library is in active use within the
Ion Trap Quantum Computing Group,
large parts of the implementation are still best considered a minimum viable
product. If you cannot work out how a particular use case would be addressed
using the library, please do get in touch: Many common lab scenarios will already
be accommodated by the current design, but perhaps the necessary interfaces were
not publicly exposed to keep the library easy to learn and flexible in terms
of implementation during initial development. Other tasks might require
extensions to the library, but detailed design ideas for them might already
exist.
To get started with ndscan, first prepare a Python 3.5+ environment with
ARTIQ as usual (Nix, Conda or some form of virtualenv is recommended). While
the intention is for ndscan to be a pure add-on to ARTIQ, some required
patches have not made their way into the official (M-Labs) upstream
repository yet. For now, use the
ion-trap/master
branch; if you are an external user, you can find a summary patch in
Issue 1.
Once your environment is set up, install this package. For example, to use ndscan directly from the Git checkout:
(artiq) $ python setup.py develop
If you haven't already, also install the oitg package.
You are then ready to run the sample experiments. Start the ARITQ master process as usual
(artiq) $ artiq_master
and launch the dashboard with the ndscan plugin loaded
(artiq) $ artiq_dashboard -p ndscan.dashboard_plugin
Now, navigate to the examples/rabi_flop.py file in the experiment explorer,
and you should be able to play around with the scan interface. (Applets are
created automatically; you might want to set the CCB mode to "Create and
enable/disable applets" in the applets dock.)
Please refer to the documentation for more details, in particular the coding conventions and design retrospective sections.
conda/ contains a very rudimentary Conda
package definition for ease of integration with a custom continuous
integration pipeline used in the Oxford Ion Trap Quantum Computing group. The
package has a number of issues (e.g. missing dependencies), and currently is not
published on a public Conda channel (nor will it likely ever be).
If you are using ndscan (or it seems potentially interesting to you), feedback
would be very much appreciated, either using the
GitHub issue tracker
or via email at david.nadlinger@physics.ox.ac.uk.