From ALBA to ALBA II. The invited talk given by the ALBA director.
Since its commissioning in 2008, SOLEIL [1] has provided users with access to a broad portfolio of experimental techniques across 29 beamlines, spanning an energy range from infrared to hard X-rays. To meet the evolving needs of the scientific community and society at large, SOLEIL is now engaged in a major upgrade — the SOLEIL II project [2] — which formally entered its construction phase in...
Short overview about Tango and Sardana activities at HI-Jena during last year including:
- HIJ-pyVision as tailored camera-analysis GUI app for laser labs
- FAIR data workflow
- Sardana enhancement for high intensity laser labs
- Web overview for experiments
This status report covers a comprehensive status update on the current state of the Controls Group of the SOLARIS synchrotron. The report reviews recent upgrades and maintenance activities aimed at improving system stability, automation, and user accessibility. Particular attention is given to systems migration and refactored rpm packaging. Finally, the report outlines ongoing new...
Upgradation and Modernization of the Tango based GMRT Control (TGC) System.
Jitendra Kodilkar 1 , Raj Uprade 1, Bhavesh Kunbi 1, Mayur Bhagade 2, Isha Gothwad 3, Anil Raut 1, Ishwara Chandra 1, Yogesh Wadadekar 1, Yashwant Gupta 1
1 National Centre for Radio Astrophysics, Pune University Campus, Pune, India.
2 *Government College of Engineering & Research, Avasari Khurd, Pune,...
A status update on the usage of TANGO Controls in LOFAR 2.0 Station Control and beyond.
Status report of ESRF, regarding usages of Tango here, what challenges are we facing with Tango, how we manage it, its development and deployment workflows, and more to be defined.
This presentation provides a quick update on the status of the LULI facilities. The LULI (Laboratoire pour l’Utilisation des lasers intenses) is located 20 km SW from Paris and operates 3 different facilities: LULI2000, Apollon and Hera. The facilities provide high energy or high power laser beams which interact with gas or solid targets. We will refresh the previous status and the current...
This presentation provides an update on the status of the ALBA Controls System and the activities of the Controls Section. It will review recent developments, operational status, ongoing improvements, and current priorities in supporting ALBA accelerator and beamline operations. The talk will also outline key challenges and future directions, including initial perspectives and preparation...
We guide you through the changes in cppTango in the last year and what is upcoming.
Tango attributes often fluctuate around warning/alarm thresholds due to noise, quantization, or control-loop oscillations, causing repeated state changes, event floods, and noisy alarm logs. This leads to operator overload and unreliable statistics, while the only current mitigation is widening thresholds and losing sensitivity to real trends. We implement hysteresis around warning and alarm...
We report on the status of the work to get device level dynamic attributes support working.
Latest news from the PyTango project.
OpenTelemetry support was added to cppTango and PyTango in version 10.0.0, but a major limitation is that you have to start your device server with telemetry enabled. There is no way to turn it on or off later, at runtime.
In cppTango and PyTango 10.3.0, we have improved this. This talk will show some examples, as well as discuss the new API, the limitations, and future plans. The main...
This presentation will review the latest developments in the Taurus projects (taurus and taurus_pyqtgraph), focusing on the recent 5.3 and 5.4 releases.
The talk will cover the completion of the main Taurus Performance Optimization (TPO) roadmap, including the integration of Tango asynchronous event subscription modes and improvements in polling fallback handling and GUI startup...
Proposal to redefine code generation for device servers in Tango.
We will present the latest developments in the TangoDatabase.
Starter is the Tango device server that supervises every other Tango device server running on a host — the backend behind Astor. This short talk presents three lines of modernization work and one experimental side project.
News on HDB++ recent developments
The SOLEIL synchrotron has been operating a TANGO-based archiving system continuously since 2006. This system is a critical component of the control infrastructure and is composed of two complementary services:
- A historical archiving service (HDB/TDB) designed for the long-term storage of continuous time-series data from TANGO attributes
- A snapshot archiving service dedicated to the...
Archiving Sardana elements (like Motors and PseudoMotors) is important for full operational context. Data from devices that participate in a scan is stored in the scan files, but other components of a setup are only updated when explicitly read. For example, motors which are used for optics alignment, can drift over time because of fluctuations of environmental parameters like temperature and...
A zoom in on the state of the SKA-Low Tango deployment and some of the issues we're working through as we scale up.
This presentation will cover the latest developments in the Sardana project and its community, including the new Sardana 3.7 release.
Current work is focused on improving Continuous Scans with support for multiple synchronization descriptions and trigger hierarchies, together with developments related to trajectory integration and shutter control. Additional improvements include...
The TANGO control system is widely used at SOLEIL, yet its administration and operational tooling remain limited, leading to increased complexity in deployment, maintenance, and incident response. This work presents practical developments carried out at Synchrotron SOLEIL to address these challenges.
First, we will introduce Castor, a deployment and orchestration tool designed to...
At MAX IV, we have developed an internal command-line tool, tango-takeoff, to manage the lifecycle of Tango Device Servers via Starter. This tool, now publicly available, is designed to simplify starting, stopping, and restarting device servers in an automated way.
tango-takeoff is integrated into our Ansible roles, enabling automatic deployment and reliable service management across...
There are several ways to store and access configuration in Tango Controls:
- Device and Сlass properties, which are the standard interface for Tango devices;
- Local files for secrets that should not be stored in properties;
- Sardana’s own file format for storing environment variables, e.g., ScanID or Measurement Groups, in addition to device properties for elements;
- Free...
It is common to find multiple PLCs controlling and protecting large scientific facilities. Through PLCs, process variables from a wide range of equipment flow across the infrastructure into the control system. Efficiently managing this data becomes increasingly challenging as system complexity grows.
At ALBA, the Modbus protocol has been used to communicate with PLC devices since the...
Control systems are inherently asynchronous: devices emit events, commands propagate across networks, and system state evolves continuously. Yet application code interacting with these systems is often written in imperative styles that make complex asynchronous flows difficult to express and maintain.
This talk explores a different approach: applying ReactiveX principles to the Tango...
At SKAO we have a large group of developers building a control system that relies heavily on the Tango event system. Our tests succeed or fail on the delivery of a single event and when that event doesn't come the immediate response is often "Tango events don't work". However, after debugging many the "Tango event system is broken" issues with tools such as ska-tango-event-monitor we have...
At the 39th Tango Community Meeting, I showed that Multiclasses can be a valid approach for complex device servers: one executable, one Jive entry, and a single home for cooperating and inspectable Tango classes. In this talk, I will present the production pattern I use — a single server combining transport classes, protocol classes, device-specific classes, and a generic interface class —...
Voltumna Linux is a custom, layered and immutable Yocto/OpenEmbedded-based distribution developed by the Controls group at Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste for Tango-based accelerator control systems. Now in production on the Elettra storage ring and the FERMI free-electron laser, it supports a heterogeneous fleet of front-ends ranging from VME PowerPC boards to x86 servers, ARM controllers and FPGA SoCs.
Instrumentation Technologies develops and maintains a Tango device
server that integrates the majority of Libera instrumentation (regardless
of their hardware platform) with TANGO-based control systems at accelerator
facilities worldwide.
During years 2024 and 2025, the Libera TANGO adapter has been upgraded
to use TANGO framework 9.5.0. This paper reports the upgrade process...
Modern synchrotron facilities expose thousands of TANGO devices, requiring coordinated control of complex operations from simple queries to fast feedback loops. Elettra 2.0, the upcoming fourth-generation storage ring at Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste, significantly increases this complexity with orders-of-magnitude higher brilliance, MHz-scale feedback rates, and greatly expanded network...
Developing Tango Device Servers still requires a significant amount of repetitive engineering work: defining attributes, commands and properties is relatively structured, but implementing device-specific protocol logic from manuals, datasheets and vendor documentation remains time-consuming and error-prone. This contribution presents S2Innovation’s AI-assisted Tango Device Server generator, a...
The Centre for Advanced Laser Applications (CALA) operates the petawatt laser system ATLAS-3000, primarily for applications in particle acceleration. These experiments rely on stable and reproducible laser beam properties to ensure control over the resulting particle beams. At the same time, the system is used by a large number of experimentalists, posing a challenge for maintaining consistent...
At the Centre for Advanced Laser Applications (CALA), the high-power laser system ATLAS 3000 is used for research in laser-driven ion acceleration. In our setup, the laser is focused onto a micrometer-thin liquid water leaf, generating proton bunches with energies of up to 42 MeV at a repetition rate of 1 Hz. However, motion of the liquid leaf target system during operation currently...
We present HIJ-pyVision, a modular Tango Controls-based software stack developed at HI-Jena in cooperation with S2Innovation for real-time GenTL Vision camera integration in high-power laser experiments.
gigevision-camera-ds
- Controls cams by GenICam interfase
- HDF5 image storage with metadata like:
- ROI masks, background image, calibrations
- automatic reconnection on camera...
IC@MS — Integrated Critical Alarms Management Software — is a web-based alarm-management platform for Tango-based scientific facilities. It provides a browser-based operator console for alarm monitoring, acknowledgement, configuration, filtering, history browsing, role-based access and API integration. IC@MS builds on the existing Tango alarm ecosystem rather than replacing it: it can work...
Operating a facility or running an experiment is simple and easy when things are working exactly as expected. But usually they do not. There is always something broken. And there is always something that does something entirely surprising, be it hardware or software.
Would it not be nice to be able to stay on top of such developments? If an operator, remotely or on site, could assess the...
The Tango Controls Roadmap breakout meeting at last year's Community Meeting set the path for Tango Controls in the future. I would like to give a quick status update, an outlook, solicit suggestions and even re-start the discussion about Tango's future.
At MAX IV, multimodal experiments are becoming increasingly important across beamlines, driven by the need to combine complementary techniques and maximize data and information acquisition during increasingly complex in situ and operando experiments. However, orchestrating multiple acquisition systems with different synchronization and data requirements remains a significant challenge for...
The introduction of complexity in scans has shown the limitations of the current Sardana Scan Framework.
Such complexities are: multiple synchronization desriptions, shutter handling, motor movement optimization, detectors "preparation" optimization, progress tracking, scan pause/resume...
This new set of requirements open the door to explore new approaches for scan configuration.
This...
We present a new feature in Sardana: if an experiment implements a trigger chain between the hardware involved (for example: a motor triggers a shutter that triggers a detector), this chain (tree) relation between TriggerGate elements can be now defined in an experiment. This will bring two advantages: 1) "Start" calls to the synchronizers will be performed in up-stream order (from leaves to...
This work presents a preliminary design for trajectory support in the Sardana core framework. The proposal introduces a generic architecture for synchronized motion and data acquisition, focused on hardware abstraction and deterministic execution. The design aims to provide a foundation for future continuous and trajectory-based experiments.
The sardana "macro sequencer" has a lot of potential, but limitations and user interface issues prevent it from being a truly powerful tool. This leads to many different people developing very similar solutions. Let's try to find out how we can improve the sequencer, so that Sardana can provide a solid solution to most common workflows.
