Controlling Motors and Counters
The "Motors/Counters" dialog in specfe is designed to provide a graphical interface to the motors and counters controlled by spec. When specfe starts up it reads the spec configuration files to determine what motors and counters are defined and automatically builds a display dialog. If the spec configuration is subsequently changed, the display will automatically adjust itself to the new configuration. The positions of the motors and the readings of the counter channel will also update whenever they change in spec, during a scan, for example. Additionally, specfe provides support for a "Tweak Mode" which may be activated to cause spec to count repeatedly, while allowing motor positions to be adjusted.
The display consists of two sub-dialogs, one for controlling the motors, the other for controlling the counters. In the case where there are a large number of motors or counters configured they will be divided among several sub-pages.
The Motor Control Dialog
The motor control dialog contains 8 columns of controls:
The motor name - as saved in spec data files
The motor mnemonic - as used in spec macros
The current position of the motor (in user units). This display will update as the motor moves, or you can edit a new value into the control and press the adjacent Move button to move the motor to a new position.
The Move button. Press this button to move the motor to the position entered in the Position control.
The Step - and Step + buttons. Press either of these to move the motor by the amount given in the adjacent Step Size control.
The Step Size control. Use this to specify the amount to move the motor when clicking the Step - or Step + buttons.
The Settings... button. Press this button to open a dialog which allows you to change the current position and software limits for the motor.
The motor movement commands work by constructing an appropriate spec command - either an 'mv' command for the Move button or an 'mvr' command for the Step +/- button, or a 'set' or 'set_lm' command for the Settings... dialog - and then sending the command directly to spec. If spec is busy doing something else - performing a scan for example - then these commands may have no effect.
The Counter Control Dialog and Tweaking Mode
The counter control dialog consists of three columns of controls for each counter channel:
The counter name - as recorded in the spec data file
The counter mnemonic - as used in spec macros
The counter value - as found by the latest spec counting operation
Additionally, there is a row of five buttons below the counter display which are used to control some aspects of the counting operation.
The Tweak button.
This is used to enter a specialized tweak mode macro installed by specfe. This causes spec to count continuously and display the counter values as they update. You can move motors during tweak mode by clicking on buttons in the motor control panel.
The Stop button.
Use this button to stop the tweak mode macro and return to normal spec operation. You can also exit tweak mode by pressing the Abort at the top of the specfe window, or by typing CTRL-C in the spec terminal window.
The ct 0.1 sec, ct 0.5 sec and ct 1.0 sec buttons.
Press these buttons during tweaking mode to change the counting time to 0.1, 0.5 or 1 second, or press them outside tweaking mode to execute a 'ct 0.1', 'ct 0.5' or 'ct 1' command directly from the spec command line.