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bluesky / ophyd

hardware abstraction in Python with an emphasis on EPICS
https://blueskyproject.io/ophyd
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
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Allow to specify dtype and shape without type inference for Signal description #1193

Closed mguijarr closed 2 weeks ago

mguijarr commented 6 months ago

(similar issue to #1178)

The signal description (.describe()) method guesses the dtype and shape of a Signal value, from the default value passed to Signal constructor.

This leads to a type mismatch, rendering the implementation insufficiently robust. Initializing a value with 0 does not inherently indicate that the signal is an integer; more frequently, the signal is a float. The describe() function would be better useful to get real information about the signal, when considering who or what is interpreting the data—whether it be a human or a process recording Ophyd data for example. The differentiation between numpy.uint32, numpy.int64, and a generic integer is significant and must be maintained to ensure data validation.

mguijarr commented 2 weeks ago

Done! (feature merged https://github.com/bluesky/ophyd/pull/1194 )