| Paper | Title | Page |
|---|---|---|
WPO002 |
The Emotion Library: A Generic Framework for Motor Controllers | |
|
||
| Emotion is a Python package recently developed at the ESRF within the Beamline Control Unit. Emotion provides uniform Python objects and a full set of standard features on top of motor controllers plugins. Emotion is built around simple concepts: Configuration, Controller, Axis and Group; writing a new motor controller plugin can be done within minutes just by filling predefined entry points to implement the communication protocol with the motor controller, leaving more complicated logic to Emotion base classes. Emotion also brings the possibility to create pseudo axes, calculated from real ones. Under the hood Emotion relies on gevent, a coroutine-based Python networking library that uses greenlet to provide a high-level synchronous API on top of the libev event loop. On Linux systems, gevent offers maximum performance and minimum burden to communicate efficiently with Ethernet, Serial or USB motor controllers. Emotion is meant to be a building block for automation software or experiment control sequencers running the gevent loop, which opens a wide range of possibilities. Emotion is shipped with a TANGO server: Emotion axes are ready to use in TANGO-powered systems. | ||