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Hands on Workshop for SECoP

22.-23. February 2023, Campus Wannsee

Get hands-on experience with SECoP – the Sample Environment Communication Protocol

Further information about the program can be found here.

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Organised by SECoP@HMC – Metadata in the Sample Environment Communication Protocol

Supported by HMC – Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration

Hands-on training based on existing SECoP implementations

Write your first SECoP compatible instrument controls based on the following software packages:

  • SHALL hardware abstraction layer library with C-compatible interface (e.g. for LabVIEW)
  • The frappy framework for programming sample environment controls (based on python)
  • Octopy – connecting SECoP with EPICS

What is SECoP?

The integration of sample environment (SE) equipment in a beam line experiment is a complex challenge both in the physical world and in the digital world. Different experiment control software offer different interfaces for the connection of SE equipment. Therefore, it is time-consuming to integrate new SE or to share SE equipment between facilities.

To tackle this problem, the International Society for Sample Environment (ISSE) developed the Sample Environment Communication Protocol (SECoP) to standardize the communication between instrument control software and SE equipment (see [1] and references therein). SECoP offers, on the one hand, a generalized way to control SE equipment. On the other hand, SECoP holds the possibility to transport SE metadata in a well-defined way.

Using SECoP as a common standard for controlling SE equipment and generating SE metadata will save resources and intrinsically give the opportunity to supply standardized and FAIR data compliant SE metadata. It will also supply a well-defined interface for user-provided SE equipment, for equipment shared by different research facilities and for industry.

[1] K. Kiefer, et al. (2020). An introduction to SECoP – the sample environment communication protocol. Journal of Neutron Research, 21(3-4), pp.181–195