NICE Help

NICE (the Neutron Instrument Control Environment) is a software package developed in-house at NCNR for controlling the neutron instruments.  It has a client-server architecture, with these key features:

Server

• High reliability, designed to run continuously through a reactor beam cycle
• Recoverable from power loss, network instability
• Hardware operation is modeled as a directed node-graph for handling constraints and dependencies between elements
• Produces NeXus (HDF5) rich data files (in addition to other formats)
•  In production since 2012

Client

• Can run from anywhere inside NIST firewall - for connecting from dedicated instrument workstations or office PCs
• Self-updating simple binary installation (link only valid inside firewall)
• Simple point-and-click graphical interface for
  • moving the instrument components
  • controlling high-level physical quantities (Q, [H,K,L], E_i, E_f, etc.)
  • setting up templated scans ("trajectories")
  • viewing real-time plots of measurements