Initial Working Example

[slactjohnson]

This is a first iteration of this setup, with an example configuration for adjusting the TPR for the NEH laser hall bay 2 OPCPA laser system.

Currently the code dynamically creates RBVs and configuration buttons for the bay 2 system. Future PRs will add support for another laser, and update the configuration for bay 3.

Known issues/features to be corrected in future PRs:

• The lasers collection in the yaml file feels clunky, but currently used to grab specific widgets (e.g. laser1_desc) on the UI. I'd like to change this so that those widgets are automatically generated and added, so this is not needed any more.
• I'd like to add a CLI with arguments for specifying the config file and other options such as a debug mode.
• We will need to add "goose" triggering configurations into the yaml file, as well as generate buttons for them, but this behavior has yet to be fully defined.
• The README could use more description of how to use it and configuration file options, which I think makes sense to do after the app is a little more mature.

[slactjohnson]

Looking for a little feedback here as this is the first PyQT application I have made in a long time. It's pretty small now, but I expect it will grow in the future as the laser group wants more complicated setups, so any thoughts on how to make this more extensible would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[slactjohnson]

(A goose?!)

This is a funny one.

That's the term that the laser group and beamline scientists use for a detuned laser pulse, essentially a dark shot. You do this by introducing a relative delay between the oscillator pulse and the amplifier firing at some desired rate, e.g. 1-in-10 pulses is delayed.

Legend has it that this name comes from the game "duck duck goose". Most of the normal pulses are ducks, or "on time", but the goose pulse gets selected to be off time.

SLAC is cool because almost anywhere else it would get called a "dark shot" or something boring.

[slactjohnson]

I think I got the pre-commit stuff right; it appears to work, anyway.

One thing I couldn't easily resolve was versioneer.py. Flake8 had many complaints about this file. I thought about fixing it manually, and even started to, but since it's not my code and I think it should be fairly static I decided to just exclude it. If that's not a great thing to do, then I may need some guidance on how to best deal with this.

[tangkong]

That's fine 👍 , the guidance is probably not to use versioneer and use setuptools_scm, but that's also something to work on in the template.

[slactjohnson]

Sounds good, thanks. I'll update this repo to our standard once the template is up to date.

I think I'll go ahead and merge this one then, with some more issues/PRs to follow next week.