NICOS 3.8 has been released

NICOS 3.8 is now available for download.

Changes in this release series:

  • Core

    • NICOS now requires Python 3.6 to run.

    • All files produced by or delivered with NICOS will be encoded as UTF-8.

    • The live data transport protocol has been extended, so that 1-D data can be delivered with information about the abscissa labels, and multiple data curves can be sent in a single event.

    • The SECoP (https://github.com/SampleEnvironment/SECoP) integration has been improved.

    • McStas support has been improved and extended.

    • Cleaned up the proposal management in the Experiment class.

    • Added a notifier class for Mattermost.

    • Tracebacks in logfiles and shown to the user now support Python 3 chained exceptions.

  • Commands

    • Added gridscan, which performs a scan over an orthogonal grid of multiple devices.
  • GUI

    • The GUI now requires PyQt 5.

    • Devices that fail to create are now shown in the devices list with an error symbol, instead of being omitted from the list entirely.

    • Add editor config to pop out dry run windows. This makes sense when the editor is in a panel configuration with limited vertical space, e.g. with a script builder on top.

    • Live data view changes: Add capability to display more than 1 curve in the live data view panel. Add configuration to select the displayed data file types, marker types, and line types. Additionally added some configuration to define the default behaviour for new live data.

    • Plots can now be exported as graphics from the history viewer.

    • Improved Windows client building.

    • Many more image data formats can now be read back in from file in the Live Data panel.

    • .desktop files are now provided for nicos-gui and nicos-history to add NICOS to the application menu on Linux.

    • The electronic logbook now accepts Markdown formatted text entry.

  • Watchdog

    • Reduced the chattering if only the message changes but not the level.

    • Added timeout parameter for each entry.

  • Documentation

    • Added data handling description and tutorial how to check the setup files.