NICOS 3.4 has been released

NICOS 3.4 is now available for download.

Changes in this release series:

  • New client/server protocol(s)

    • The daemon communication layer has been made protocol independent. It is now possible to configure the transport layer and serializer to allow connections from clients which are not running in the Python world, without implementing the Python pickle protocol on the client side.

  • Core

    • Added support for disabling devices. The components here are a new ‘CanDisable’ mixin, a new status ‘DISABLED’ to show disabled devices, and new GUI elements to disable/reenable the devices.

    • The compatibility of new setups will be checked before starting to unload/load anything, so the user will not get an empty device list in case of an error during loading a new setup.

    • Attached devices can now be allowed to not exist in the loaded configuration.

    • Userlimits are reinitialized when set to (0, 0).

    • ‘Multi’ methods (multiWait, multiStatus, …) now raise the highest- severity exception. Repeated display of exceptions when waiting on a single device is avoided.

    • Runtime re-assignment of device methods is now forbidden.

    • Current script name is now returned in the daemon “getstatus” query.

  • GUI

    • Implemented log-x scale for scan plotting.

    • Added an option to show/hide error bars in scan plots.

    • The window entries in the GUI config learned the ‘setups’ option to display them depending on the loaded setups in daemon.

    • The “control device” dialog now hides the device parameters at first, but allows to display them. In ‘expert mode’ they will be displayed by default.

  • Commands

    • tomo: add a parameter to rearrange the 180 deg position into the sequence of the positions instead beeing the first position.

    • Improved cosine fit.

  • Dry-run

    • Full log output is now available even in sandbox mode.

    • Fixed TACO/TANGO/EPICS devices access.

    • Fixed Measurables with hardware access.

    • SeqSleep is now not executed anymore.

  • Tools

    • check_setups: ‘Exp’ device is now allowed in more than one setup.

  • Tests

    • Added timeout decorator to test functions that seem to hang sporadically.

    • Do not try to import special/hidden dirs.

  • Doc

    • Added tutorials to create new devices, commands, and data sinks.

    • Added options description of some panels.

  • Development

    • All includes are now sorted according to PEP8 rules (but facility import follow nicos core imports).