The libedit Library Now Recognizes Tabs In Prompts

A spec-only modification to the NETBSD libedit command-line editing library distributed with spec now properly recognizes tab characters included in prompt strings. Although the spec command line prompts don't include tab characters, the built-in functions input(), yesno(), getval() and getsval() have used the command line editing library for obtaining input since spec release 6.06.04. The optional prompt string passed to those functions is then passed to the command line editing library. Previously, the libedit library (the default included and linked with spec) ignored tab characters. The alternate readline library, which can be optionally linked with spec during spec installation, has always displayed such tab characters correctly.

libedit Updated

The libedit source code included with the spec distribution has been updated to release 20240808-3.1, obtained from thrysoee.dk/editline. See the libedit help file. Note, the patches contained in the file spec_libedit.patch have been applied to those sources.

Fix For chk_acq_using Macro

A bug in the chk_acq_using macro (part of the recently introduced acquisition macros) introduced in spec release 6.12.04 that prevented the macros from detecting whether ROIs were configured has been fixed. The problem would only manifest if the associated MCA or image device was not configured to read or save the data during scans.

ROI Counters Now Track Enabled Status Of Associated Device

The enable/disable macros now includes a call of a new acq_chk_enable macro that will call the roi_reconf() macro. The roi_reconf() macro is part of the recently introduced acquisition macros for creating region-of-interest (ROI) counters and for controlling MCA and image devices. Previously, enabling or disabling such devices did not automatically enable or disable associated ROI counters. If no ROI counters are configured, acq_chk_enable is defined as an empty string. The acq_chk_enable is only called if an MCA or image device is included in the devices to be enabled or disabled.

More Fixes For mca_ascan and mca_dscan

Two bugs in the mca_ascan/mca_dscan macros have fixed, namely errors calculating the beginning and ending points when the beg argument was greater than the end argument and errors saving the calculated positions for relative-position scans.

Typo Fixed in geo_surf.c

A typo introduced in the surf geometry source code file geo_surf.c in spec release 6.11.02 that prevented the code from compiling has been fixed.

New Chi-Fixed Mode For fourc Geometry

The four-circle geometry code and macros now include support for a chi-fixed mode.

Built-In USER Symbol Now Set By -U fake_user

If spec is invoked with the -U fake_user option introduced in spec release 6.10.04, the built-in symbol, USER will now take its value from fake_user, rather than the user associated with the current login account. Note, the login account user name is still used by spec internally for tilde expansion of file names.

libedit Updated

The libedit code included with the spec distribution has been updated to release 20240517-3.1, obtained from thrysoee.dk/editline. Also, the libedit directory in the spec distribution now includes the file spec_libedit.patch, which contains the several patches made to the library to better work with spec. See the libedit help file.

Updated fourc sectors Macro Only Displays Viable Sectors

With certain four-circle geometry modes, notably theta-fixed and chi-fixed, some of the sector transformations change the HKL values. The sectors macro will no longer display those sectors. See the fourc help file.

The ci Macro Arguments Can Now Be Expressions

The ci macro (calculate inverse), which calculates and displays the HKL values corresponding to the motor positions given as arguments will now work even if the arguments are expressions.

New FLY_dwell Global Variable

The dwell time calculated for the multi-channel scaler used with the flyscan macros is now stored in a new global variable named FLY_dwell, making it available to user macros called during fly scans. See the flyscan help file.

Fix For mca_ascan and mca_dscan

A bug in the mca_ascan and mca_dscan macros that broke the macros if the scan range was inverted has been fixed. See the file macros/mca_scans.mac in the spec distribution. Use mca_scan_setup to configure these macros. Note, these macros are currently not installed by default.

Another Fix For Recently Updated getline()

A crash resulting from using getline() with a previously opened file that has since been removed has been fixed.

Fix For Mclennan PM600/1000 Servo-Mode Configuration

A bug that prevented Mclennan PM600 or PM1000 motor controllers from properly configuring servo mode, selected using PM600_S in the config file, has been fixed.

Fixes For Smaract MCS2

An issue where starting more than seven or so motors failed due to a too-small buffer has been fixed. In addition, there is new code to recover from lost socket connections.

Fix For udev Rules

A typo in the spec-installed udev rules on Linux that broke the rule for setting permissions for The LAWICEL CANUSB module has been fixed.

Updates To Python Tools For Python 3.12

spec includes a number of Python related tools, such as the splot utility and the Eiger hardware server. In addition, the spec help files use the Python docutils package for formatting. Python is, however, a moving target. The spec Python tools and utilities have been updated to be compatible with the Python 3.12 release. Most of the Python code in spec remains compatible back to Python 2.6, although the eiger_server utility requires Python 3.7 or later.

Improved List Navigation In Configuration Editor

The drop down lists in the edconf hardware configuration editor can now be navigated by typing multiple characters to match an entry. Previously only the first character of an entry was used for matching. Also, the the characters j and k, previously used for navigation, are now used for matching, but new ^P and ^N key entries are available to move up or down by one line. Type ? in the configuration editor for a list of commands.

Improved prdef For Embedded Single Quotes

The prdef command will now display the macro definition as a string delimited by double quotes if the definition contains unescaped single quotes. Previously, prdef would always delimit the definition with single quotes. If the definition used unescaped single quotes, the prdef output would not be suitable for reading back into spec.

New STATE_FILE Built-in Global Variable

A STATE_FILE built-in global parameter is now created that is set to the full path name of the user state file. The save_state macro will use its value, which allows the macro to work even if spec was invoked with the -T or -U flags, which create alternate tty or user names that are used to name the spec session's associated state file.

Fix For Scaler Screen Of Configuration Editor

A bug in the edconf hardware configuration editor, where canceling a change in the drop down list of controller types on the Scaler screen would cause the choice to reset to the first item in the controller list, has been fixed.

Trinamic TMCL Motor Controllers Updates

Trinamic TMCL motor controllers models TMCM-1180 and TMCM-1260 are now tested and working with spec. Additional TMCM models (1021, 1111, 1160, 1241, 1290, 3212, 3214, 3230, 3351, 6110 and 6212) should also work with spec, although the code has not yet been tested with the corresponding hardware. In addition, the parameter information (description, range, access) displayed with the "dump" and "gdump" motor_par() commands should now always be appropriate to the associated model. Also, those commands now take an optional pattern argument to only show parameters whose description matches the pattern. Finally, a "get_ain" motor_par() command is available to read the analog inputs. See the tmcl help file for details.

Fix For Excess Memory Consumption With MCA/Image Macro Hardware

An issue, where each mca_get()/mca_sget()/image_get() call with macro hardware devices would allocate memory for a temporary array that wouldn't be freed until a return to the main spec prompt, has been addressed. Previously, for example, memory usage in a scan would grow by the size of the data array for each point when reading from an MCA or image macro hardware device. For a scan with many points, the memory growth and associated overhead could slow performance.

Fix For epics_get() Reconnection

Previously, an epics_get() in a loop such as:

for (;;) { p epics_get(PV); sleep(1) }

would never reconnect following a channel access "Virtual circuit disconnect" event (such as loss of an Ethernet connection) even after the hardware connection was restored. However, spec would remake the connection after returning to the main prompt. With this spec release, the epics_get() function will take care of remaking the connection. Note, adding a call of wait(0x28) within the loop would be sufficient to regain the connection with prior spec releases. See the wait help file.

Fix For Physik Instrumente GCS-2 Motor Controller Initialization

A problem with spec's support for the Physik Instrumente GCS-2 motor controllers where the initial read of the command list could time out on slower interfaces has been fixed.

Option To Set Pause For Tsuji Controllers After Move Start

A new "mdelay" motor_par() option is available for Tsuji PM16C-02/04 motor controllers. The value (in seconds) is a sleep time for spec to pause after sending commands to start one or more motors on the controller. Some users report occasional communication failures if spec immediately requests status after starting a multiple motor move. Values on the order of 0.1 seconds should give the controller time to prepare to receive new commands. The motor_par() mnemonic argument is any motor associated with a Tsuji PM16C. The setting is global for all configured PM16C controllers and is saved in the state file. The default value is zero.

Fix For Recently Broken savmac

An update to the savmac macro in spec release 6.11.02 to use fprintf() instead of the deprecated on() and off() functions had a bug that prevented printing the left parenthesis of macro functions with no arguments. That error is fixed in this release.

Fix For array_dump() Crash

Bugs in array_dump()/data_dump() (it is the same code for both) that could result in a crash due to memory corruption have been fixed.

Standard Macro Tuneups

The mstartup macro will no longer prompt for parameters associated with geometry motors in a geometry-less configuration. The chk_acq_using macro will no longer produce error messages about undefined ROI_INFO or ACQ_flags when called by roi_reconf() if no acquisition or ROI actions are configured. The newfile macro will behave sensibly if DATAFILE and/or DATAFILE_TEMPLATE are unset or set to the null string.

Fix For TMCL Parameter Restore Feature

A bug introduced in spec release 6.10.03 that partially broke the parameter restore feature for the TMCL motor controllers has been fixed. The bug prevented the restoration of parameters on other than the first motor on a particular controller board under certain conditions. The attempt to restore parameters occurs when spec detects the power has been cycled on a particular board, which erases all volatile parameter values. The skip of additional motors occurred after spec restored the value of an optional parameter. If there were no optional parameters, spec would continue to the next motor.

Eiger Server Now Works With acq_setup Macros For ROIs

The region-of-interest (ROI) counters implemented in the new acquisition macros can now be used with the eiger_server server hardware support. The macro file eiger_roi.mac is now obsolete. It is currently still included in the spec distribution, but is not installed. See the acq help file for details on configuring ROI counters.

New changes Help File On the Web

The certif.com web site now includes a single changes help file that includes all the update notes in reverse chronological order starting from the latest release and going back to release 2.5 from May 11, 1988. Such a file has been included in the spec distribution for some time.

Fix For Motorless flyscan Macro

An error where the dwell time per point for motorless fly scans was miscalculated has been fixed.

New SCAN_D_shared Macro

A new SCAN_D_shared macro is defined by default as shared to put the SCAN_D scan data array in shared memory. Define SCAN_D_shared as an empty string to make SCAN_D an ordinary non-shared data array.

Updates To splot, eiger_server and pyspec

With this release, the Python utilities and packages included with spec have updates to continue to install and run with newer Python releases. Also, some recent changes that broke the utilities with older Python releases have been addressed.

Automatic Directory Creation When Opening Files

Functions that open files will now attempt to create directories as needed when they are part of a file path. Built-in functions that use this capability are open(), on(), fprintf(), array_dump() and data_dump(). In addition, directories will be created as needed for log files specified on the spec startup command line with the -l logfile option and for the daemon-mode log file, if daemon mode is active. If directory creation fails, for example, due to insufficient permissions, the functions will fail in the same way as if the file could not be opened.

More Flexible Syntax With @ Indirection

The @ indirection operator takes the string value of the item following and turns that into a variable name. For example:

var = "PI"; print @var

would print 3.14159. When the @ indirection operator precedes something in parentheses, previously, that something could only be a variable or associative array element. With this release, the item in parenthesis can be any expression that evaluates to a variable name on which the @ can operate.

Additional Install Option

The Install script to install the spec distribution now accepts a -y flag to go along with the recently introduced -C flag to remove files that get recompiled. The -y flag means "yes", remove the files without asking for confirmation.

Updated help Macro

The help topics displayed when the help macro is invoked without an argument are now organized by category. In addition, multiple topics can be used as arguments or entered when prompted.

Update For When DATA_DIR Is Prepended To DATAFILE

Previously, if DATAFILE didn't contain a / character and if DATA_DIR existed, the newfile macro would prepend DATA_DIR to DATAFILE to create the data file path. As the newfile macro now supports templates and a directory that is possibly specified via a template can be included in the path, and since spec can now create directories automatically, the rule for prepending DATA_DIR is changed. Now, DATA_DIR is prepended if DATAFILE doesn't begin with a / or ./ and if DATA_DIR exists.

Note, the newfile macro tests whether DATA_DIR exists before using it. The macro doesn't use the automatic directory creation feature for DATA_DIR.

Fix To Ensure HDF5 "gzip" Option Is Available On All Platforms

A build issue, where support for the "gzip" compression option for creating HDF5 files was not included in spec's distributed libhdf5.a library for some Linux platforms, has been fixed. One can check whether compression is available using the following command on the library in the spec distribution directory:

nm libhdf5.a | grep compress2

If the output is "U _compress2", then compression is available. If compression is not available, one can update the spec distribution, or one can build a local version of libhdf5.a and relink spec using that libhdf5.a. When building the HDF5 library locally, be sure the zlib development package is installed on the system. Note, the spec distribution includes a precompiled libzlib.a. Sources corresponding to the HDF5 and zlib libraries included in the current spec distribution can be downloaded at certif.com/downloads/extras/hdf5.tgz and certif.com/downloads/extras/zlib.tgz.

Fix For Possible h5_data() Crash

Previously, if an optional argument to h5_data() specified a data type that was wider than the native data type of the array being written (say "double" for a "short" array), the function call could lead to a crash. That issue has been fixed.

The queue() Function Now Works

The new experimental queue() function described in the spec release 6.11.03 was inadvertently disabled by a last minute edit in that release. The function is now available. See the queue help file.

Fix For setor1 Macro Typo

A typo in the setor1 geometry macro introduced in spec release 6.11.02 has been fixed.

Can Now Use cdef() With Macro Functions

The cdef() chained-macro built-in function can now be used to define spec macro functions. Previously, cdef() was only available for ordinary macros. Unlike ordinary macros, which are expanded very early in the input stream, macro functions are parsed and executed as encountered after parsing and during execution of the encompassing input. In addition, macro functions can return a value. With this spec release, if any of the cdef() calls that define parts of a chained macro include parenthesis after the macro name, the macro will become a macro function. spec will automatically add an initial and final curly bracket to the pieces of the chained macro. Note, though, cdef() macro functions don't currently allow arguments in the definition. However, a cdef()-defined macro function can be called with arguments that can be accessed in the definitions using the argc, argv[] or arg1, arg2, ... features. See the macros help file for details.

New argv[] For Macro Functions and Other Improvements

All arguments to macro functions can now be accessed using the automatically created local associative array-like variable argv[]. Elements are numbered starting from "1". In addition to representing numbers and strings, the argv[] elements can represent another associative array or a data array, matching the data type passed to the macro function. In addition, the symbols arg1, arg2, etc., are created for all arguments. Previously, the symbols were only created for arguments beyond those included in the macro definition. See the macros help file for details and limitations in accessing elements of argv[] that represent arrays.

New "date_format" spec_par() Parameter

Previously, spec used the US format for time and date which puts the month ahead of the day. It is now possible to specify the default format for the string returned by spec's built-in date() function. A call of:

spec_par("date_format", "%a %d %b %T %Y")

would set the date() output to this format:

Tue 29 Aug 20:46:50 2023

instead of the default format which continues to be "%a %b %d %T %Y", producing:

Tue Aug 29 20:46:50 2023

Any format recognized by the strftime() library function is accepted. Beware of selecting a format that leaves out important information. As with most spec_par() parameters, the value is saved in the user's state file. See the spec_par help file.

New file_from_template() Macro For Data Files

A new file_from_template() macro is used with the newfile macro to allow data file names to include conversion specifications that are replaced with time or date values or specific spec parameters. The time and date conversions are those supported by the C library strftime() function and used by spec's date() function. Additional conversions are available for the spec data file name, scan number, point number and others. See the newfile help file for further information.

newfile Macro Now Accepts File Template

The newfile macro now takes a file template argument rather than necessarily a file or path name. Each call to newfile will create the DATAFILE name from the template, using the current date and time, if such conversions are present in the template. The macros that write to the data file will not automatically update DATAFILE if, for example, elements of the current date are included in the template and the current date changes during a spec session. However, the new usage newfile -u will update DATAFILE using the current template, stored in the new standard global variable DATAFILE_TEMPLATE.

New Options For Saving MCA/Image Data

The acqsetup macro now includes an option to set whether and how to save the acquired MCA or image data. Spectra can be saved in the standard spec data file or in one or more separate files. If separate files are chosen, there are options to use one additional file for all spectra, one file per scan, one file per data point or one file per array. In addition, one can configure spec to automatically generate file names, or one can define a template for saving such data, which can include conversion sequences for the standard spec data file name, scan number, point number and array name, along with the other strftime() conversions. Currently only ASCII save files are supported. See the acq and newfile help files.

Changes For How ACQ Devices Are Read In the Macros

The new get_acqdev macro, which reads all the enabled MCA and image devices has been relocated to the standard get_counts macro, which is the lowest level macro for reading counters. Previously, get_acqdev was part of the count, _pcount (associated with powder mode) and _upd_count (associated with updated counting) macros. This change ensures that the ct macro and others will read enabled devices. Note, though, if reading such devices is slow, one might want to use the disable/enable macros to temporarily stop the devices from being read. See the disable help file.

Updated chk_move, chk_count and chk_acq Macros

The chk_move, chk_count and chk_acq macros now include a call of the new macro functions user_chk_move(), user_chk_count() and user_chk_acq(), respectively. These macro functions are defined using the cdef() chained macro function. The standard macros create a starting definition for each of these macro functions that simply returns a zero. The macro functions can be redefined locally, as needed, to return values associated with user hardware that indicate whether the associated device is busy. Note, the chk_move and chk_count macros included non-blocking calls of the built-in wait() function and are used in the standard spec macros for updated moving and counting. The chk_acq() macro also includes a wait() call, but isn't currently used with the standard macros.

In addition, tests of the values of the global variables USER_CHK_MOVE, USER_CHK_COUNT and USER_CHK_ACQ are no longer included in the chk_* macros. It is doubtful that these variables have ever been used. See the util.mac file in the spec distribution for information on how to restore inclusion of these variables, if it turns out someone does use them.

Fix For flyscan When Using Pitch Rather Than Intervals

The flysetup macro prompts for the choice of using "intervals" or "pitch" for setting the number of points in the scan. An issue with the calculations when using "pitch" has been fixed. The bug dates from spec release 6.10.05, which introduced macro code to round the number of intervals to solve the problem when an intervals argument is an expression involving floating point values and the integer value of that expression may be one less than the expected value. Integer rounding wasn't appropriate if the argument was the fly-scan bin width.

Additional Support For Physik Instrumente GCS-2 Controllers

The initial support for Physik Instrumente GCS-2 motor controllers now includes the model E-272.3SDA in addition to models C-663.12 and C-863.11. There are some changes to the code structure to accommodate the new model. The code is now even more likely to work with additional models, although fine tuning may still be needed. See the pi_gcs help file for details.

Fix For tango_put() Crash On Missing Input

An old bug (since 2014 spec release 6.02.00), where a call to tango_put() that doesn't supply a value argument for the corresponding attribute argument could lead to a segmentation fault, has been fixed.

Crash With Deeply Recursive Macros Fixed

Previously, recursive macro calls deeper than 169 would cause a crash. That limit is still present, but spec now prints an error message and returns to the command prompt.

Fix For Recently Updated getline()

An issue with the recent updates to the getline() function to maintain current position in multiple files has been fixed. Previously, if an open file was modified, spec might not reopen the file, thus returning stale content. When using getline() to read the next line of a file, spec saves the current byte offset. Note, though, if content is removed or added before that offset, the string returned by getline() may not be the next line after the last one read.

Improved Resynchronization For Tsuji Counter/Timers

The spec support for the Tsuji counter/timer models now does a much better job detecting when responses are out of sync with the commands and with the subsequent resynchronizing of the communication over both socket and serial interfaces.

Fix For Recent getline() Bug

A bug in the getline() update in the previous release that could result in a segmentation fault has been fixed.

Fix For chk_acq_using Macro

A small addition to the chk_acq_using macro, which is part of the new acq.mac package, eliminates a possible spurious error message. See the acq help file.

Fix For USB-CTR "set_bits" Option

A bug introduced in spec release 6.10.01 that broke the "set_bits" counter_par() option for the Measurement Computing USB-CTR has been fixed.

The getline() Function Now Tracks Multiple Open Files

Previously, getline() would only keep track of the current position of one input file. With this release, spec will remember the current position of each file until getline(file, "close") is called for each file.

Default Values Returned For "modules" and "hdw_roi?" Parameters

The "modules" parameter for MCA and image-type devices introduced in spec release 6.11.03 returns the number of distinct modules available on a device where each module can produce a data array. The "hdw_roi?" parameter has been recognized since spec release 6.10.01. A nonzero return value indicates the controller can return a value for a specified region of interest. If no hardware ROI available, spec will read the data array from the device to calculate a region of interest. Both of these parameters are used in the new acquisition macros. (See the acq help file.) This spec release insures that devices implemented using macro hardware or server hardware will now have sensible default return values if the user macros or server code ignore the parameter. The default for "modules" is one. The default for "hdw_roi?" is zero.

The ^C Characters Appear On Screen Once Again

Sometime around spec release 6, the ^C characters could stop appearing on the terminal screen when a user typed a ^C to interrupt the current activity. This spec release should have the characters once again echoed to the screen.

Problem With Echo Off In unix() Subshells Fixed

An issue beginning with spec release 6.09.05 where the terminal session in a unix() subshell would often start in cbreak, no-echo mode has been fixed.

Issue With RCP Library Linking Fixed Yet Again

This spec release tries another approach to providing links to RPC library functions used by some of spec's supported hardware. Built-in support for these functions was removed at different release levels of glibc depending on what build flags different Linux platforms chose to include when building the library. Linux distributions provide an alternative libtirpc.a that includes the RPC functions, but that library usually needs to be manually installed. If the platform's glibc doesn't include RPC support, spec's install script will link with the alternative library if it is available. Otherwise, spec will link with a dummy library and print a message explaining the situation. This method should work on all Linux platforms.

Several Issues With the New acq Macros Fixed

Updates in both the acq macros and in C code address several issues. Bugs in the macros that prevented the "auto_run" and "soft_preset" parameters from being set for image devices and that produced spurious error messages about "unconfigured" devices are fixed. Problems with macro hardware or hardware server implementations didn't recognize the "modules" or "hdw_roi?" mca_par()/image_par() parameters have been resolved.

Updated Support For Physik Instrumente GCS-2 Controllers

The spec support for the Physik Instrument GCS-2 controllers, such as the C-663.12 and C-863.11 models, has been updated to work with daisy-chained configurations. See the pi_gcs help file.

Issue With splot_cntl("open") Fixed

An issue introduced in spec release 6.11.01, where a splot_cntl("open") command could interfere with other function's "open" commands, such as implemented in plot_cntl(), getline() and h5_file() has been fixed.

Fix For medet_setup Used With Multix Detectors

A bug in the configuration menu macro for the the Multix detectors that prevented setting the channels count correctly has been fixed. These detectors are implemented in spec as server hardware. See the multix and server_hdw help files.

eiger_server Arm Mode Reconsidered

The "arm_mode" parameter introduced in the previous release has been removed. Instead, spec's eiger_server will arm the detector at the start of a scan and issue trigger commands for each point. When counting for a single acquisition, spec will configure, arm and trigger the detector for each acquisition. This method allows users the flexibility in configuration they need, but still optimizes performance during scans.

Preliminary Support For Physik Instrumente GCS-2 Controllers

This spec release contains preliminary support for Physik Instrumente GCS-2 motor controllers. The code has been tested with models C-663.12 and C-863.11, but will likely work with additional models, although some fine tuning of the code may be needed. See the pi_gcs help file for details.

New "arm_mode" Parameter For eiger_server

The eiger_server included with spec for the Dectris Eiger 2D detector includes a new "arm_mode" parameter to choose between the Eiger's default "arm-then-trigger" mode for each image and a custom mode that offers improved performance by arming once and sending only a trigger for each acquisition. Previously, the custom mode was the only mode available. The "arm-once" mode is still the default for eiger_server. See the eiger help file for details.

Fix For Missing Prompt Strings In Log Files

New code introduced in spec release 6.11.03 inadvertently prevented spec's command-line prompt strings from appearing in log files. That issue is resolved in this release.

Unlimited Length For unix(cmd, var) Strings

The unix() built-in function executes the command given as the first argument using the system shell. With a second argument, the output of the command is placed in that variable. Previously, the length of the output was limited either to 4096 bytes or to a length specified in an optional third argument. With this spec release, there is no limit to the length of the command output stored in var and no need for a third argument.

Renamed Motor and Counter Channel Controller for MODOCA Devices

The controller types for motor and counter channels in the config file have been changed to MODOCA from SP-8_EM and SP-8_S (for motors) and from SP-8T_EM, SP-8C_EM, SP-8T_S and SP-8C_S (for counters). It was an oversight in the prior coding to have multiple names in each category. The unit number associated with the channel identifies which MADOCA controller the channel is using. The configuration editor (edconf) invoked by the config macro will automatically change the old names to the new names. The spec Install script also runs edconf -I to update the config file for any changes of this sort. New spec releases will work with config files with either the old or the new names. Prior spec releases will not recognize the new names.

Fixes For Tsuji Counter/Timer Configuration

A crash associated with using multiple Tsuji Counter controller with one a "counter/timer" and others as "counters only", where the "counter/timer" unit was not unit 0, has been fixed. In addition, spec will now display an error message that says the "counter/timer" must be unit 0 if it is not. Also, spec will once again increase the channel count by one to accommodate the phantom timebase channel associated with Tsuji timer/counters (channel 8 on an 8-channel counter, channel 16 on a 16-channel counter, etc.). Thus, the NUM field in the configuration editor no longer needs to be set to one plus the number of physical counter channels.

Fix For Crash Using Parameter "address" With Macro Hardware

An old bug that could lead to a crash when trying to read the "address" parameter for macro hardware motors or counters has been fixed. The issue only occurred when the ADDR parameter was not set for the associated controller in the config file. The bug was introduced in spec release 6.08.04 for motor_par() and spec release 6.09.05 for counter_par().

New "active" Read-Only Parameter For MCA and Image Devices

The mca_par(), mca_spar() and image_par() functions now return a nonzero value for the new parameter "active" if the associated device is running. This parameter is used with the updated MCA and image device ROI and acquisition macros to support the "read during updated counting" option.

New "modules" Parameter For MCA and Image Devices

The mca_par(), mca_spar() and image_par() functions now recognize the new parameter "modules". If the device supports multiple modules at the same unit address, it will return the number of modules present. If the device doesn't support multiple modules, the function calls return the value one. This parameter is used with the updated MCA and image device ROI and acquisition macros to allow separate configuration of ROIs and read/save behavior for each module.

MCA and Image Macro Hardware Can Now Get Subaddress

The first argument to the MCA and image device macro hardware _cmd() and _par() functions will now encode a subaddress if the spec user-level function calls that generated the calls to the macro functions include a subaddress. Subaddresses are used if the unit has multiple modules. Within spec, subaddresses may be specified as 0.0, 0.1, 0.2, ..., or "0:0", "0:1", "0:2". In the latter case, the arguments must be strings. In both cases the first number is the unit number, and the second number is the module number. In the calls to the macro function, the first form will be used. The unit and module address can be extracted as:

def sim_mca_cmd(num, key, p1, p2, data) '{
   local   n, unit, module

   n = sscanf(num, "%d.%d", unit, module)
   ...
}'

In the above, if n is one, there was no subaddress used in the spec command. If the macro hardware doesn't use multiple modules, there is no need even to look for a subaddress.

Note also, the new mca_par(), mca_spar() and image_par() parameter "modules" will be passed to the _par() macro function to set or get a value for the number of modules in the unit. If the _par() function ignores the "get" request, spec will assume there is only one module.

Install Script Improved For "Slash-less" "install" and "aux" Directories

If installing a test or private instance of spec using directories in the distribution directory for the bin and spec.d locations, the Install script will prepend the current working directory to the location when patching the installed scripts and programs that need to know the paths to certain other installed files. This action is only taken if the specified directory name doesn't contain a / character.

queue() Function To Schedule Commands

A new function named queue() is available to schedule commands to be run once at a fixed time in the future or to repeat at an interval. Commands from the queue will normally run while spec is waiting for keyboard input. If spec is otherwise occupied commands in the queue will be deferred until the next opportunity spec has to check the queue. However, a queue("check") can be issued within running statements to give commands that are due a chance to run. Note, moving and counting commands are currently not allowed. See the new queue help file for details.

Daemonize Mode To Run spec As a Background Server

New start-up options -S3 or -S4 place spec in a background server mode with no connection to the terminal session. All commands to daemon-mode spec must be through its server interface. See the daemon help file for details.

ROI and MCA/Image Device Acquisition Macros Updated

The ROI and MCA/image device acquisition macros are now included in the single acq.mac distribution file. There is no longer an roi.mac file. In addition, the setup macro is now called acqsetup, although roisetup is included, but simply defined as acqsetup. The acqsetup macro "read and save" option now offers the choices to just read or to read and save the associated MCA or image device during scans. (One might want to just read the MCA in order to update the live-time spectra displayed in the splot utility.) There is also a new option to select between reading the device repeatedly during updated counting or to read only at the end of the count interval. The macros now offer configuration sections for each module when the device has multiple modules associated with the unit. In addition, the "soft_preset" option is now configurable for each MCA and image. See the acq help file.

Powder Mode Macros Updated

When powder mode is enabled, spec rocks a designated motor over a fixed distance at each point in scans involving other motors. The powder-mode macros now include an option to have the powder motor speed determined by the scan count time. In addition, that option, the option for unidirectional powder moves, the powder motor designation and rocking width can all be configured on the command line with a single invocation of the setpowder macro. See the powder help file for details.

Fix For df_array_xxx()

A misplaced parenthesis that broke the df_array_xxx() call in the df_array() macro function has been shifted into the correct position.

Motorless Fly Scan Updates

The motorless flyscan macro now interprets its first argument as the number of points, rather than the number of intervals. The scan heading shown on the screen and with the #S line of the standard spec data file shows the second argument as the time per bin, irrespective of whether the fly_setup configuration option is to give arguments as time per sweep or time per bin. This behavior is now the same as for fly scans with motors.

Typo In setor1 Fixed

A typo in the setor1 geometry macro introduced in spec release 6.11.02 has been fixed.

Better Saving Of Runtime Parameters For Selected Acquisition Hardware

This spec release includes an updated method for saving runtime parameters for acquisition hardware. Several MCA devices now have parameters such as time presets, group size, settings for the "soft_preset", "auto_run" and "auto_clear" modes, etc., saved across reconfig calls, along with being saved in the state file. This feature is currently implemented for the Dectris Mythen, the Amptek DP5, the Measurement Computing USB-CTR (in MCS mode) and for the macro hardware MCA and image devices. Other devices will likely have this feature in future spec releases.

Eiger Server Updates

This spec release includes preliminary support for stream version 2 ("V2") firmware from Dectris for the Eiger 2D detectors. If "V2" is selected via the "stream_version" image_par() parameter, separate images can be saved based on the active threshold filters. See the eiger help file for details.

Issue With RCP Library Linking Fixed

An issue where the RPC library functions were not linked into spec with C library versions earlier than glibc 2.32 has been fixed.

Possible Crash When Using New Runtime Counters With Certain Devices

The implementation of runtime counters by way of the new "add" parameter to counter_par() introduced in spec release 6.10.01 was flawed and could cause spec to crash if certain hardware timers were configured. The ROI macros introduced in the same spec release use runtime counters. That bug has been fixed. The hardware controllers with the issue were the ESRF VCT6, Labo NT-2400, NI 6601/2 and 63XX, Ortec 9XX, Detel S21DC, FST SMC2100, spec server counters, EPICS scalers and EPICS PV counters.

Fix For Broken MDrive and Siemens D5000 Controllers

A couple of editing errors in spec release 6.11.02 that made the MDrive motor controller and the Siemens D5000 counter/timer unusable have been fixed.

Fix For Bugs In calc() and setor0

The previous release introduced a bug in the calc() function that prevented the optional second argument to be recognized as any number other than zero. That broke the calcR macro used in the setlat macro associated with orientation matrix geometries. The USER_UB macro used in several orientation matrix macros also broke. In addition, a typo in the update to the setor0 macro is fixed. The bugs were introduced while implementing the new function to return an array of HKL values and while making changes to old standard macros to remove use of the _1, _2, etc. symbols.

New Auto-Save For State File Available

A new "auto_savstate" spec_par() parameter is available. When given a nonzero value, the state and history files will be written out automatically before the main spec prompt, but no more frequently than the value (in seconds) of this parameter. The feature may be useful in situations where the spec computer tends to crash. Otherwise, as has been the traditional behavior, the files are only written when spec exits or if the built-in savstate command is entered. See the spec_par help file.

Consistent Response For motor_par() Parameter "channel"

The return value for motor_par(mne, "channel") now consistently returns the channel number from the hardware config file. Previously, for most motor controllers that number channels from one (rather than from zero), the returned value was one less than the configured channel number. Affected motor controllers are those listed in the "MOTOR NUMBERING" section of the motors help file.

New Function To Return Array Of HKL Values For an Array Of Angles

For geometries that use an orientation matrix, a new calc() function is available to return an array of HKL values when passed an array of motor positions. If arr is a data array with the number of columns set to three plus the number of geometry motors (_numgeo), the call calc(9, arr) will place HKL values calculated from the motor positions into the last three columns of arr. Small changes were made to all of the 3D orientation-matrix associated geometry files (geo_fourc.c, geo_psic.c, etc.), making no_can_do a global variable and assigning a value to a new num_geo global variable to accommodate this feature.

New Option For array_dump() To Return a String

If the value of the initial optional argument to the array_dump() function is the empty string "", the function will return the formatted array output as a string, rather than write the output to the screen or to a file. See the arrays help file.

New "argc" Element In strdef() Optional Array

The strdef() function returns the string definition of the macro name passed as argument. If an optional associative array second argument is included, it is filled with parameters associated with the macro. For macro functions, a new associative array element, "argc" is created and assigned the value of the number of arguments in the macro function definition. See strdef in the funcs help file.

Debug Level Warning Now Shows Use Of Undeclared Variables

Best practice in spec is to declare variables explicitly global or local. The latter avoids unintentional name space conflicts, where a symbol used in one macro might have its value changed in another. If debug "warning" level 2048 (or 0x800) is enabled, spec will print messages each time an undeclared variable is referenced. Note, assigning values to a symbol at the main prompt will automatically make the symbol global and is equivalent to declaring it global. Assigning values to a symbol within curly brackets make the symbol implicitly local and would be the source of "undeclared" warnings. Note also, the "warning" debug level prints messages about using "unset" variables. However, such usage is generally acceptable, as one can rely on unset variables having a value of zero or null.

The undef Command Now Accepts Metacharacters In Arguments

Arguments to the undef command can now include the standard metacharacters *, ? and []. As usual, * matches anything, ? matches any single character, and [] enclose a range of characters to be matched. To avoid inadvertent removal of a large number of macros, if the number of matching macro names exceeds a threshold, keyboard confirmation is required. The default threshold is 10, but can be changed with the new "undef_threshold" option to spec_par(). See the spec_par help file. Also, if an argument contains only * or ? characters, confirmation is required (to avoid an accidental undef ?, for example). Note, the previous behavior where undef with no arguments would produce a syntax error is gone. Instead, undef with no arguments is accepted as input, but does nothing.

Install Script Updates

The spec installation requires a C compiler to create the spec executable based on site configuration parameters. If the C compiler package was not installed, the resulting error messages did not clearly indicate the problem. The Install script now checks for the compiler and if missing, requests that one be installed.

In addition, a new -C option is available to remove compiled files from a previous run of Install. The files will be recreated as the installation proceeds.

Finally, the test for the presence of the Sun RPC libraries is improved. If the support is missing, the spec installation will continue with just a message warning that the several hardware devices that require RPC support will not be available. Note, the GNU C library officially removed RPC as of glibc version 2.32 (August 2020). An alternative library, libtirpc, is available, but no longer required by spec if RPC hardware is not being used.

New calcHKL_A() Macro Function To Calculate HKL Arrays

The calcHKL_A() macro function takes an array where each row contains a set of geometry motor positions and returns an array where each row contains the corresponding HKL values. If the array argument has _numgeo + 3 columns, the HKL values will also be assigned to those last three columns.

Updated savmac and cplot_plot Macros

The savmac and cplot_plot macros have been updated so they no longer use the deprecated file on() and off() functions. Instead, the macros use fprintf() to write to a single output file or device.

Improved Use Of df_print() In Standard Macros

Use of the df_print() in the standard macros, introduced in spec release 6.10.06, has been tuned so that in more instances each call is for one line of output. The introduction of df_print() is to make it easier to filter or redirect output intended for the spec data file. Previously, the #S and #D scan header lines were both included in one call to df_print(). The lines now are passed in distinct calls. Also, the header block containing motor and counter names and mnemonics is now passed to df_print() one line at a time. Finally, the comment and qcomment macros have been modified to overcome the limitation on the number of arguments allowed with df_print().

Updated Macros For Showing Scan Data Points

The sdata_dump() macro, called by pts, now takes an additional optional argument to specify a file in which to save the points. The arguments to pts have the same meaning as the arguments to the splot macro (see the splot help file). The arguments determine which array to use, which columns to use for the independent variable, the dependent variable(s) and the rows (points) to show. The macros default to displaying the data in SCAN_D from the last scan. In addition, a new sdata_pts() macro function is included that behaves as pts, but with a first argument that is passed to sdata_dump() as the optional file argument. If the file argument is the null string, sdata_dump() and sdata_pts() return the list of points as a string.

Fix For plotselect With Arguments

When invoked with arguments, plotselect will assign the counters given as arguments as the counters to be plotted in the first plot window. Also, plotting in secondary windows (if configured) will be cancelled. The feature to assign the counters once worked, but hasn't for some time.

Fix For Fly Scan Pre-Scan Limit Checks

The pre-scan limit checks in the fly scans were not effective if scanning from a higher value to a lower value, as the macros did not check the start position against the high limit or the final position against the low limit. In addition, the limit checks did not account for the half-interval offset added to the start and final positions. Both issues are now fixed.

General Tidying Up

Minor clean up of the standard macros includes making sure local variables are explicitly declared and using the more robust motor_num() function rather than motor_mne() to check whether a particular motor mnemonic has been configured.

Fix For array_dump() Continuation Lines

An error where backslash continuation indicators would appear in the output of array_dump() for a two-dimensional array when the "%#C" option was used been fixed. The number (#) designates the number of rows per line for a 2D array, but doesn't split lines. The "%W" options specifies the number of elements per line and if that splits a row of the array, a backslash continuation indicator will appear.

New Acquisition Mode For Eiger Server

The hardware server for the Dectris Eiger 2D detector has been updated to include support for accumulation mode. This mode enables combining multiple images over a set count time into a single image to get around issues with pixel or read-out counter saturation. Either the maximum accumulation time for each individual image or the number of acquisitions to use in the final image can be specified. The final accumulated image will be the image that is saved and used for region-of-interest calculations. See the eiger help file.

New HDF5 Options To Test If a Group, Dataset Or Attribute Exist

The h5_attr() and h5_data() functions can now be used with two arguments to test whether a given object already exists in the HDF5 file. See the hdf5 help file for details.

Plotting and Analysis Now Handle One-Dimensional Arrays

The array_plot() function used for data plots and the array_op() function to calculate analysis values, such as full width at half max (FWHM) or center of FHWM (cFWHM), now work well with a one-dimensional array argument, such as an array containing an MCA spectrum. If the array has only one dimension, the index number of each element is used as the x independent variable, while the array element at each index is the y dependent variable. Both the internal C code and the standard macros have been updated. See array_op() in the arrays help file and the splot help file.

array_plot() Of One-Dimensional Sub-Array Now Uses Base Array Index

The array_plot() built-in function previously numbered the x-axis for plots of one-dimensional arrays from zero to the number of points. The function will now use the actual index number of the full array. For example, array_plot(arr[100:200]) will number the x-axis from 100 to 200, rather than 0 to 100, as was the previous behavior.

New "basename" Option For the Built-in OUTFILES Array

The built-in OUTFILES array introduced in spec release 6.02 now includes an additional element called "basename" which contains the last component of the file path. See the syms help file for more information on OUTFILES. Type print OUTFILES from spec to see the complete array for the current session.

syms Display Improved

The columns in the screen output with the syms command have been reorganized for better readability.

Unresponsive Now Included In "unusable" Status

The "unusable" test with mca_par(), mca_spar() and image_par() now returns non-zero if the MCA or image device has become unresponsive. With some devices that are initially usable and later become unresponsive, spec notices and sets an internal flag. Previously, a test for unusable status might print an error message indicating an unresponsive device. Now the "unusable" test will include a check for unresponsiveness in the return value without generating error messages.

New splot_cntl() Syntax For Sending Arrays

The splot_cntl() syntax for sending array data to the Python splot utility via socket communication (as opposed to shared data) is changed. The "send" keyword is still used, but rather than including the array name in the string argument, the array name follows as a second argument, as in

splot_cntl("open;send", SCAN_D)

or

splot_cntl("send", SCAN_D[100:200])

The standard plotting macros now use the new syntax. Only one array can be sent per call. This change was needed to support sending one dimensional arrays. When sending a one-dimensional array, the internal code will send a two-dimensional array with a first column (for a row-wise array) or first row (for a column-wise array) set to the index number of the base array. For example, if sending arr[12:20], where arr[] is a one-dimensional array, the index numbers will run from 12 to 20.

Improved splot_cntl() Behavior

The splot_cntl() function for sending commands via a socket interface to the Python splot utility using the spec server communication protocol has been rewritten to improve behavior. The function includes a feature where commands entered before the connection is complete are saved in a queue and sent when the connection is ready. Previously, only commands from the first splot_cntl() call would be queued. Now commands from multiple calls are queued. In addition, the function will now return the reply associated with the last command sent. For example

print splot_cntl("command_list")

will print a list of the available commands. In addition, a new command, splot_cntl("status") will return one of three strings: "not connected", "trying to connect" or "connected" to indicate the current state. This command joins the "open", "kill" and "send" commands that are executed within spec, although the "send" command to send an array generates an "adddata" message to splot followed by the array data.

Standard Macros Can Now Read and Save MCA and Image Data

A scheme for automatic reading and saving of MCA and/or image data at each point of standard scans is included in this release. Calls of new standard macros, acq_head, acq_precount, get_acqdev and save_acqdev have been included in low-level standard macros as follows. The behavior of these new macros is somewhat preliminary, but the locations and purposes of the macros themselves is unlikely to change. By default, the macros are empty, but if roisetup is used to define region-of-interest counters or configured MCA or image devices to be read and the data saved, the macros are redefined to standard macros that perform the tasks.

The standard _head macro now includes a call of acq_head, a macro that will write header information associated with enabled MCA or image-type acquisition devices to the data file. The lowest level counting macro, count_em, now includes a call of acq_precount that does any special preparation for the acquisition devices. The standard count macro, called by the scans to count to monitor or time, and the standard _upd_count macro, called during updated counting, now each include a call of get_acqdev to read the enabled the acquisition devices. For _upd_count, get_acqdev is only called once when the counting has finished. The standard _loop macro now includes a call of save_acqdev which will write MCA or image data to a file.

Currently, the roisetup macro is used to configure which MCA and image devices should be read and have data saved. Also, data will be saved as ASCII to the standard spec data file. A forthcoming spec release should include a scheme for automatically saving such data to binary files. The above macros are in the new distribution file macros/acq.mac.

New vEscan Macro For Variable-Spaced Energy Scans

A new vEscan macro for variable-spaced energy scans is included with the vscan macros. As with the other vscan macros, the start and finish arguments have an added focus argument inserted. Like the standard Escan macro, an optional fixQ argument is available to adjust the geometry motors to maintain a fixed reciprocal space position as the energy changes. See the vscan help file.

Plotting Macros Require Row-Wise Arrays

The standard plotting macros have generally only supported row-wise arrays (where rows correspond to data points and columns to the independent variables, such as motor positions, and dependent variables, such as counters). Some of the macros attempted to accommodate column-wise arrays, but probably not well. The macros now officially only support row-wise arrays. Note, though, the built-in functions, such as array_plot() and array_op(), work with either type of array.

Scan Data Array Now Zeroed At Start Of Scans

The scan_data_init() macro called at the first point of a scan now assigns SCAN_D = 0. Previously, a scan with fewer points than a prior scan but with the same number of motors and counters would contain left over data beyond the last data point from the prior scan. Note, a new SCAN_D would be and is still allocated if the number of columns changed, which happens for example, if the number of motors being scanned changes.

New Fly Scan user_flyscan_post_sweep Macro Hook

user_flyscan_post_sweep is a cdef() defined macro called just before channels are normalized (if that option is enabled) and written to the data file and screen. It would be a good place to add to SCAN_D data that depends on channel number, but is not from the MCS. It is an empty macro by default. See the flyscan help file.

Fix For splot Macro With Range Of Counters In Arguments

The feature of the splot macro where the range of y-axis counters or array columns can be specified using start:end now works as described.

Fix For Motorless Fly Scans

Updates to the fly scan macros in the previous release (associated with the feature to configure how many lines of output display on the screen for fly scans) broke the screen output for motorless fly scans. That issue is fixed.

Fix For Scan Number When No Data File

A bug introduced in spec release 6.10.06 where the scan number (SCAN_N) would be incremented twice if there was no data file (DATAFILE == "") has been fixed.

Removed Obsolete _hkl_lim From Geometry Macros

The _hkl_lim macro definition has been removed from all the geometry files, as it is no longer used with the newer array-based scanning.

Even Better Test On RPC Library With Install

During spec installation, the Install script tests for whether libtirpc.a is required for SUN RPC function calls used by certain supported hardware. The improved test in spec release 6.10.04 looked for specific words in compiler error messages. Those words might not be present if the system language was other than English. The test has been rewritten to remove the language dependency.

Possible Crash When No Shared Memory Segments Available Fixed

A possible crash where the system kernel would run out of shared memory segments during spec start up has been fixed. Running out of shared memory resources is more likely on MacOS than Linux as the default MacOS allocation is quite meager and unlike on Linux, if a process with shared memory segments crashes, the segments are not automatically freed. See notes at the end of the arrays help file on how to increase the shared memory resources on MacOS.

Fix For spec_menu() Issue Setting Number Values For Array Child Entries

A spec_menu() bug introduced in spec release 6.10.06 broke the specific case of assigning number values to associative array elements associated with a menu item with a "parent" attribute when the array element had a string value on entry to spec_menu(). The issue is now fixed. This bug broke setting region-of-interest ranges in the recently included roisetup macro.

Now Use Scale Factor With Normalized Counter Option

The "normalize_to_time" implementation introduced in the previous release that enabled spec to automatically normalize counters to the elapsed time did not use the counter's scale factor on the resulting value. That issue is now fixed.

Fix For Crash When Debugging TANGO Functions

When the TANGO error stack contained very long message strings (on the order of 1 Kb), the code to format messages displayed with DEBUG level 128 would result in a segmentation fault due to a buffer overrun. That issue, associated with the tango_io(), tango_get() and tango_put() functions, has been fixed.

Reworked EPICS Scaler Events

The EPICS standard scaler record support has been revised to use events on the process variable VAL rather than CNT to detect when counting is finished. In some configurations, the CNT "done" event sometimes arrived before events associated with the final values of the associated counters. VAL posts after all the final counter values have posted.

Updated Defaults and Latest Firmware Recognition For Tsuji Counters

spec now recognizes Tsuji counters with firmware CT16-01F. In addition, the code now uses the most likely default values for parameters that depend on firmware version. Parameters such as the number of bits available in the counter channels, the number of bits available for the time preset and the channel used for the monitor preset vary with firmware version. However, recent models tend to use the same values. If spec doesn't recognize the firmware version, spec will default to values used by the recent models.

New Normalized Counter Option

It is now possible for spec to automatically normalize counter readings to the elapsed time from the timebase scaler channel. Such a counter can be configured on the Scaler screen of the configuration editor by selecting "normalize_to_time" in the "Use As" column. Additionally, a new "normalize_to_time" counter_par() option allows the configuration to be changed (and read back) from the spec command line. As with most such parameters, a reconfig or restart will restore the normalize behavior to the value in the config file. See the counting help file.

Protection From Disabling HKL Macros

Since the earliest days, the spec executable reads a standard command file based on the first four letters of its name from the spec auxiliary file directory, SPECD. A no-geometry instance named spec reads the file SPECD/spec.mac, which contains a single line of code to call the no_hkl macro to undefine irrelevant reciprocal space macros. Also since the beginning, spec reads a command file named spec.mac in the current directory on startup. That means if a user ran a version of spec that did include geometry support (twoc, fourc, etc.) and if the user started in the auxiliary file directory, the no_hkl macro in that spec.mac file would be read and all the reciprocal space macros (wh, br, hklscan, etc) would be undefined. This release of spec prevents that from happening by not reading a spec.mac file if started from the auxiliary file directory and the calc(2) "user-added" function has been assigned. (The standard geometry macros all use calc(2) to calculate HKL from motor positions.)

Clean Install Of pyspec Files

The pyspec subdirectory of the spec auxiliary file directory (normally /usr/local/lib/spec.d) contains files used by spec-related Python utilities, such as splot, eigerserver and specfile. The standard spec installation script now completely replaces the pyspec contents rather than leave obsolete files in place.

Fix For Server Command Line Display During Client Commands

Recent updates to fix ^C issues with a spec server running client commands broke the behavior where the server prompt and typing would be restored after the client generated output was displayed. That problem is now fixed.

Fix For Client Display Of Server Errors With remote_eval()

The feature for a spec client to display an error message associated with the failure of a remote_eval() call to a spec server included in release 6.10.05 didn't always work as intended. That functionality is working better in this release.

Thorlabs Motor Controller Support Updated For Serial and MLJ150

The Thorlabs APT motor controller support now works with a serial (RS-232) interface along with USB. In addition, model MLJ150 is now supported. See the thorlabs help file for details.

Additional Trinamic TMCL Motor Controllers Supported

Trinamic motor controller models TMCM-1110, TMCM-1141, TMCM-1211 and TMCM-1240 are now tested and working with spec TMCL support. See the tmcl help file for details.

Fix For scan_data_init() Macro To Accommodate Fly Scans

A problem where the SCAN_COLS[] assignment didn't agree with how SCAN_D[][] was filled when using fly scans has been fixed in the scan_data_init() macro. The issue occurred when the MON or DET channel were disabled for the scan. SCAN_COLS[] is an associative array where each element contains the mnemonic associated with the corresponding column of the SCAN_D[][] data array.

Additional Option For Fly Scan Display

An additional option for how to display sweep data at the end of each fly scan is now available, namely a mode where all lines are displayed if the number of lines is less than a cutoff value, otherwise the first, middle and last blocks are displayed. The cutoff value can be entered in the fly_setup macro.

Fix For Unidirectional Mesh Fly Scans

An issue where recent updates to the fly scan macros broke unidirectional mesh fly scans has been fixed.

Internal Type For Motor Speeds Now 64 Bits

In spec release 6.08.01, storage for motor positions was switched from 32-bit integers to 64-bit integers to accommodate new motor controllers that required the additional resolution. It turns out that the motor speeds (units of steps/sec) for the same motor controllers also need to be able to be specified to higher resolution. Motor speeds are now maintained as 64-bit integers in spec and the edconf hardware configuration editor.

array_plot() Now Returns an Error For Out-Of-Bounds Array

The array_plot() function now appropriately returns an nonzero value to indicate an error if the array arguments access out-of-bounds array elements. The plotting macros now check for that error and will only print one error message rather than seven.

Fix For ^C During sock_get()

The reworked signal handling introduced in spec release 6.09.01 prevented a ^C from immediately interrupting a sock_get() call. That issue is fixed.

Fix For Obscure spec_menu() Issue

A issue when using the "bit" key with a child item of a spec_menu() specification, where selected values weren't correctly assigned to an associative array passed as the @ value, has been fixed. (The fly_setup macro uses such a construct.)

Fix For motor_par() "read" For Tsuji PM16C-02/04 Controllers

Code that would likely produce a segmentation fault when using the motor_par() "read" command-pass-through option without an accompanying send string with the spec Tsuji PM16C-02/04 motor controller support has been fixed.

whats Can Take Multiple Arguments

The standard macro whats, which displays what the given argument is in terms of spec objects, now accepts multiple arguments and will display the type of each one.

New Macros For Writing To the DATAFILE

The standard macros now send all string output destined for DATAFILE through a new macro function df_print(). The arrays sent to DATAFILE by the fly and mca scans now call a new macro function df_array() instead of the function array_dump(). A new df_flush() macro is called at the end of a scan in the standard _tail macro. These macros enable use of an alternative scheme for outputting data.

In the default case, the above macros write output to DATAFILE, just as before. However, if the new global variable DFILE_HOW is set to some string word, the above macros will instead call local macros named df_print_word(), df_array_word() and df_flush_word() which would output the strings and arrays passed as arguments as local needs require.

Changes to the standard macros are rather minimal. Usage such as fprintf(DATAFILE, ...) becomes df_print(...). In a few cases where fprintf() printed out partial lines, the entire output line is now collected into a string and that string is passed to df_print().

Existing local macros that write directly to DATAFILE will continue to work just fine. If local users want to take advantage of the new DFILE_HOW feature, local macros should use the new df_*() macro functions for data file output.

See the macros/file.mac file included with the spec distribution for more details on using DFILE_HOW.

SCAN_D Now Matches Data File Columns

The SCAN_D array, which holds motor positions and counter values for spec scans, now has the same column arrangement as is saved in the data file. The first column is the main independent variable of the scan. That is followed by other motors and/or HKL values involved in the scan. Next is the epoch time associated with the data point. The remaining columns are the the counter values. The counter associated with DET is always the last column. The counter associated with the preset (either time or monitor counts) is the second to last column. Other counters are ordered by counter number. What has changed is that SCAN_D now includes the epoch time, and the preset and DET counter values are now placed in the last columns.

Fix For Using Parameters In splot Macro To Specify Range

Previously, a command such as:

splot tth det 3:NPTS-3

would fail as the macros wouldn't properly evaluate the expression for the range of points. The above usage now works.

Fly Scan Updates

The fly scan macros include a number of updates. When using a prescaler, the number of intervals and range is now adjusted to insure a full complement of motor pulses will arrive to generate sufficient channel advance pulses to the multi-channel scaler. The macros attempt to maintain the range as best as possible, with most of the adjustment being on the number of intervals.

A new fly_setup option is available to configure how much of the sweep data is displayed on the screen. Since the data can't be displayed until it is read at the end of the sweep, it may not be desirable to have perhaps hundreds of data rows output to the screen at once. Configuration choices include:

o Display just the last line (traditional behavior)

o Display all the data

o Display the first and last block of data

o Display the first, middle and last block of data

The block size is currently six data points (or rows).

Also, an issue setting the motor pulses per unit in the fly_setup macro has been fixed.

Configurable Gate For USB-CTR In MCS Mode

A new "gate_mode" mca_par() option for the Measurement Computing USB-CTR counter/timer is now available. spec supports that module in multi-channel scaling mode, which is used by the fly scan macros. See the usbctr and flyscan help files.

Select Motor Controller Support Now Uses 64-Bits For Speed

Support for macro hardware motors, spec server motors and the EPICS motor record has been updated to use the 64-bit resolution for motor speeds available in this spec release.

SmarAct MCS2 Controller Support Speed Update

The units for motor speed for the SmarAct MCS2 controller are now steps per second and can be specified with up to 64-bit integer precision. Note, previous support for the controller set the speed to a value which was the product of the config file setting and the steps per mm parameter. Current users of that motor controller need to adjust the values configured for slew rate, base rate, home slew rate and home base rate to reflect the updated support, which is now the usual steps per second.

Support for libusb-1.0

spec can now be linked with version 1.0 of libusb. Previously spec only supported version 0.1, which is on longer maintained. On Linux, spec USB support is available using built-in code that makes direct calls to the Linux generic USB driver. For MacOS, support is only through libusb. Version 1.0 appears to be required on MacOS Monterey. Both versions of libusb work with Linux, but the built-in code should be preferred. To use the USB libraries, the site_libs parameter in the spec install_data file needs to be assigned with the name of the library during spec installation, along the lines of:

site_lib="-L/usr/local/lib -lusb-1.0"

On MacOS, one may need to download the library source, build and install. Find the source at github.com/libusb. Most Linux distributions will have a downloadable package available with a name along the lines of libusb-1.0.0-dev.

encode()/decode() Updates and Fixes

The encode() and decode() functions now support Base64 in addition to JSON. The JSON decode() function now takes an optional associative array argument into which any JSON string can be decoded. JSON values that are objects or arrays will be returned as string array elements, which can then be passed into decode() again. See the encode help file for details.

New "match_one" Option For getline()

The getline() function accepts a new option, "match_one", which unlike "match", only returns the one line that matches the regular expression. See getline in the funcs help file.

HDF5 Support Updated To Current HDF5 Release

The built-in HDF5 support in spec is now using HDF5 stable release 1.12.1. Previously, spec was built against HDF5 release 1.10.1. See the hdf5 help file for details on spec's HDF5 support.

Certain Errors On spec Server Now Display With remote_eval()

When a "fatal" error occurs on a spec server while running a command sent by a spec client using remote_eval() or from any client sending a CMD_WITH_RETURN message, the server response will now include the error message in the return packet. A spec client will display the error. A fatal error is an error that resets spec to the command prompt, such as a syntax error or certain hardware errors. (See the HDW_ERR help file for a list of fatal hardware errors.)

The exit command also resets to command level. Messages associated with nonfatal errors or displayed with eprint or eprintf() will also be sent and displayed if an exit command follows the error within the statement block. However, if any additional commands between the error generating command and the exit generates an ordinary (non-error) message, the error message will not be returned.

Distribution and Installation Updates

The scripts and Makefiles used to prepare and install spec distributions have been cleaned and reorganized a bit. Entries for obsolete computer architecture targets are gone for the most part. (Supported platforms/architectures are currently 32-bit and 64-bit linux on both Intel and arm and 64-bit macOS on Intel and arm.) Commands and logic for setting file ownership during installation is improved. The spec_zcat gzip compression utility is gone, as there is no longer any risk that the "z" flag to tar will not be available.

The Python splot Utility Now Includes HKL on Plots

The Python splot utility will now show the reciprocal space HKL coordinates at the start of a scan in the plot header of the screen display.

Fix For Both Server and Client Response To ^C

The reworked signal handling introduced in spec release 6.09.01 broke some ^C behavior when a spec server was running a command from a client. A ^C entered on the server keyboard was not recognized while executing an SV_CMD or SV_CMD_WITH_RETURN packet (generated by remote_cmd() or remote_eval() in a spec client). In addition, a spec client's remote_eval() could not be interrupted by a ^C on the client keyboard. Both issues have been fixed.

Energy Macros Updated For Asymmetric Cut Monochromator Crystal

For type 5 two-crystal monochromators (configured with two motors with mnemonics mono and monp), the motor position calculations now take into account an asymmetric crystal characterized by the cut angle beta, stored as a constant global variable g_mo_beta. The setmono macro will prompt for the value of the cut angle. A zero indicates no correction.

New Rounding For Number Of Intervals In Scan Macros

The number-of-intervals argument in spec scans is now rounded to the nearest integer. That solves a problem when the argument is an expression involving floating point values and the integer value of that expression may be one less than the expected value. For example, the integer part of 10.2/0.01 is 1019, not 1020, due to the inexact representation of floating point numbers on a computer. If expr is the expression used as the number-of-intervals argument, the scan macros now use int(expr + 0.5).

New scantypes Help File

A new help file, scantypes, summarizes the many standard scans available with spec.

New -U fake_user Start-Up Option

The new -U fake_user start-up option creates a state file associated with the name fake_user rather than the actual account user name. Such a feature may be useful at a facility that requires all visitors to use the same computer account, but would like to maintain separate spec state files for each visitor. The site could require visitors to begin their sessions by entering their visitor ID, which could be placed in an environment variable used by a shell script that invokes spec with the -U flag and that variable.

Better Test On RPC Library With Install

On some Linux systems the standard C library (glibc) no longer includes support for the SUN RPC function calls, used by spec's VXI11 and SPring-8 MADOCA hardware support. The library functions are needed to link spec during installation. An additional library (libtirpc.a) can be installed on those systems. The spec Install script does a check on whether that alternative library is needed and available. If needed, but not available, the script requests it be installed. The previous version of the check was not entirely robust across platforms. The test is this release should work better.

Fix For array_dump() Not Closing File

An old bug, where under some conditions an output file specified as the first argument to the array_dump() or data_dump() functions was not closed at the end of the function call, has been fixed.

Fix For spec_menu() "text" Item

A bug in the recently introduced "text" spec_menu() item which could result in corrupted menu displays has been fixed.

Additional Parameters Available For Galil Controllers

The built-in support for Galil motor controllers now recognizes additional non-standard optional motor parameters and recognizes additional motor types. The recognized Galil commands and associated spec parameters are as follows:

KP      proportional_gain
KI      integral_gain
KD      derivative_gain
IL      integration_limit
FV      veloc_feedforward
FA      accel_feedforward
DB      on_band
DS      off_band
OE      off_on_error
ER      error_limit
SK      max_pulse_freq
MT      motor_type
CE      configure_encoder

The first six can also be specified using the similarly named standard optional parameters (names having an initial "dc_"). Commands for all but the last two parameters are normally only sent with the first move after start up or a reconfig, or if the values have been changed with motor_par(). The command motor_par(mne, "update") will update the controller immediately. The last two commands are sent immediately after reading the config file or when changed with motor_par().

Setting "motor_type" to values 12, -12, 12.5 or -12.5 turns on encoder mode and position maintenance mode (if available). Values of 1 or -1 turn on servo mode (if available). Setting "motor_type" will override the encoder and servo mode selections made by setting the controller to GALIL_E or GALIL_S in the config file. The MT command is only sent to the controller if "motor_type" is set.

For encoder and servo modes, positions are read with the TP controller command, otherwise RP is used. When encoder mode is enabled, the chg_dial() function will send a DE controller command in addition to a DP command. In encoder mode, if the standard optional parameter "encoder_step_size" is set and nonzero, the value read from TP or sent with DE is scaled by the ratio of motor steps to encoder steps.

Updates To Mclennan Motor Controller Support

The communication with the Mclennan motor controllers has been made a bit more robust. Also, spec can now read and return long replies, such as those generated by the "QA" (query all) and "HE" (help) commands. spec now recognizes the motor types PM600_P and PM600_S that signify using an encoder with position maintenance and using a servo motor. New motor_par() commands "update" to program the controller with the current parameters in spec and "dump" to display all the controller parameters are available. Additional optional parameters are recognized. See the new mclennan help file for details.

New motor_par() "update" Option For Newport SMC100

A new motor_par() "update" option for the Newport SMC100 motor controller will send commands to update any changed parameters. Updating some parameters requires a reset/homing cycle that can take several seconds. As before, reprogramming is done automatically, if needed, on the first move after any parameter has changed. This new option allows the parameter programming to be done before executing a move command. See the newport help file.

Better Thread Mutex Locks For Measurement Computing USB-CTR

spec creates a dedicated thread to read data from the Measurement Computing USB-CTR when running in multi-channel scaling (MCS) mode. The code includes mutex locks around the USB access to allow access to other functions of the USB-CTR while MCS acquisition is in progress. The first implementation of the mutex locks would sometimes freeze out attempts to access the controller through the main spec thread (to access the I/O pins, for example). This spec release takes a slightly different approach to the mutex locks that appears to solve the problem.

Fix For DSP CC-488 GPIB-To-CAMAC Controller

A problem with the DSP CC-488 GPIB-to-CAMAC controller, where the code did not properly poll the LAM (look-at-me) register, has been fixed. Yes, at least one spec user still uses CAMAC.

Accommodation For Dangling ifs In Command Files

The lexical analyzer will now complete a dangling if (that is, an if statement without a corresponding else) at the end of in input file and no longer generate syntax errors. The standard macro source files have included a last line of the sort, "# Do not remove this line -- it keeps the parser from waiting for an "else"." for a long time. Such measures are no longer needed.

New Installation Option For Reading TIFF Image Files

The fmt_tiff.c file included in the spec distribution has always include the option for reading TIFF images files with spec's fmt_read() function. However, because inclusion required that the TIFF libraries be available, the option was off by default. Turning on the option required changing a #define option in the fmt_tiff.c file and including the TIFF library in the site_libs install parameter. With this release, the spec Install script now prompts for the TIFF library. If a library is selected, the fmt_tiff.c file will automatically be built with the TIFF file read option enabled. Updating or reinstalling spec with the same install_data file will automatically maintain the TIFF file read option selected.

deg() and rad() Now Work With Data Array Arguments

The functions deg() and rad() can now take a data array as input argument. The functions perform the operation on each element of the array and return the results in an array of the same dimension as the argument array.

Updates For Newport SMC100CC/PP

The spec support for the Newport SMC100 motor controller now distinguishes between the CC and PP flavors, allowing the base rate to be set for the PP type. In addition, nonstandard optional motor parameters, "micro-step_factor" and "full_step_value" are recognized for the PP flavor, while "closed_loop" and "encoder_increment" are recognized for the CC type. Refer to the Newport manual for a description of the parameters. See the newport help file for a list of all parameters supported by spec. Also, an issue where spec would unnecessarily put the controller in the "configuration" state to reprogram parameters that hadn't actually changed in value has been fixed.

Updated Support For Trinamic TMCM Controllers

The Trinamic TMCL support now includes support for the model TMCM-6214. In addition, spec now sets all parameters associated with the "SixPoint" motion profile used by this and other models. See the tmcl help file.

Tsuji Counter CT08-01F Recognized

spec now recognizes Tsuji CT08 with firmware 01F.

Fix For Screen Width Changes In spec_menu()

The spec_menu() function compressed long strings as intended when redisplaying the menu with a narrower screen, but didn't uncompress the strings if redisplayed after the screen was made wider. That issue has been fixed in this release.

Fix For Logarithmic Axes With Python splot

Issues when using logarithmic axes with the Python splot utility have been addressed. Data points with values less than or equal to zero are now not plotted and not used in setting the axis range.

Fix For USB-CTR MCS Dwell Time

A bug introduced in spec release 6.10.01 with the Measurement Computing USB-CTR, where the parameter set using the mca_par() "dwell" option was converted to an integer, has been fixed. With the bug, dwell times less than one second were set to zero, which is invalid. The code sets the dwell time to the default of 0.01 seconds when the parameter is not valid.

Fix For Distribution File Ownership

The Install script now does a better job of setting the owner of the distribution and installation files to the owner specified in the install_data file. Previously, a number of files ended up belonging to the root user, even if another owner was configured.

Fix For flyscan Macro

An issue where the flyscan macro generated motor positions incorrectly if scanning from a larger to smaller position has been fixed.

Fix For Saving EPOCH With cscan Macros

The cscan macros now save the EPOCH value to the data file to millisecond resolution, which now matches the behavior of the standard scans.

Assignment Now Allowed With array Declaration

The array declaration now supports initialization. For example,

array a[10] = [ 1, 2, 3 ]
string array a[20] = [ "this is a test" ]
ushort array a[2][3] = [ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ]

Unassigned array elements are set to zero. Surplus initializers are ignored. For 2D arrays, elements are assigned row by row. In the last example, the assignment produces:

SPEC> print a
{{1, 2, 3}, {4, 5, 6}}

See the arrays help file.

Fix For spec Client Connecting To Remote Servers

An issue introduced in spec release 6.09.13, where a spec client might fail to connect to spec servers on a different host, has been addressed.

Fix For Typo In Updated sixc.src

Missing def keywords in the recently updated sixc.src file have been added. The update was to implement the new macro definitions for aziscan and azidscan that use the new _pa_scan_prep geometry pseudo angle scan.

New Runtime Counter Creation

Runtime counters can now be created without editing the spec hardware config file or reinitializing the hardware. The command:

counter_par(mne, "add" [, macro_name ])

creates a new counter with the specified mnemonic. The optionally specified macro function will be called with the counter mnemonic as argument when the getcounts command is executed. When spec executes the getcounts command, hardware counters are read first, then macro-hardware counter macros are called, then runtime counter macros are called. This order determines what counter values are available to the macros. The command:

counter_par(mne, "delete")

removes the specified counter. The command:

counter_par(mne, "name", "New Name")

can be used to assign the counter name. Otherwise the name will be the same as the mnemonic. Mnemonics can be at most 7 characters, while names can be 15 characters long.

The runtime counters disappear on exit or hardware reconfiguration (reconfig). The built-in config_mac macro can be used to have the counters automatically recreated after reading the hardware configuration. (See an example of that in the roi.mac file.)

The "controller" and "device_id" options to counter_par() both return the string "RUNTIME" for these counters.

Bad Mnemonics for counter_par() and motor_par() Now Return an Error

When the counter_par() and motor_par() functions are called with an invalid mnemonic or channel number, the functions now set HDW_ERR to value 6 (unconfigured hardware) and return -1. Previously, such errors were "fatal" in that spec would jump back to the main prompt.

New "config" Option To image_par(), mca_spar() and mca_par()

The new usage image_par("config") displays the current configuration for all images devices in the same format that mca_sel("?") displays MCA device configuration. That is, information including unit numbers, device description and enabled status is shown. The usage image_par(sel, "config") returns a string containing the configuration for the selected unit only, or returns zero if there is no corresponding entry in the hardware configuration file. For symmetry, the usage mca_spar("config") and mca_spar(sel, "config") does the same for MCA devices. mca_sel("?") still works as before.

New spec_menu() Feature For Including Multiple Parameters On Single Line

New spec_menu() "family" and "parent" keys allow setting values for multiple parameters on a single line. The "family" key configures IDs for each sibling. The "parent" key associates an item with a "family". In addition, a new "prefix" key is associated with "parent" descriptions. A new "check_macro" key allows configuring a validation macro to be called on number and string items. See the spec_menu help file for details.

Better Validation Of config File Motor/Counter Numbers

The code to read motor and counter configuration from the spec hardware config file now has improved validation of the motor and counter numbers. spec now insists on consecutive numbers with no duplicates. The edconf configuration editor always saves files using those rules, but the update catches errors that might be introduced by a manual edit of the file.

Metacharacters Allowed With Some Chained Macro Operations

When the strdef() function is used to return the definition of a cdef chained macro, the second argument specifying the cdef key can now include the standard metacharacters *, ? and [] for matching. When using delete, enable or disable flags with cdef(), the third argument specifying the cdef keys can now include the same metacharacters. As usual, * matches anything, ? matches any single character, and [] enclose a range of characters to be matched.

eval() Quiet Mode Puts eprint/eprintf() Messages In EVAL_ERR

The eval() optional "quiet" argument suppresses spec errors but puts the error message in the global variable EVAL_ERR. In this release, messages from eprint and eprintf() are now treated in the same manner, in that they won't appear on the screen and the last such message will be assigned to EVAL_ERR. See eval in the funcs help file.

Improved Syntax With 2D Associative Array for and if Commands

Previously, spec would allow a loop or a test for just one element of a 2D associative array, but would not accept an empty set of brackets for the second index. That is:

local arr[] = [ "one":1, "one":2, "two":3 ]

for (i in arr["one"])
   print arr["one"][i]

would work, but:

for (i in arr["one"][])
   print arr["one"][i]

would not work with the empty brackets resulting in a syntax error. That usage is now permitted, as is also:

if (2 in arr["one"][])
    print "yes!"

A set of empty brackets for the first element has always worked.

New HISTCMD Built-in Variable Holds Current History Number

The command line history number is now accessible as the parameter HISTCMD. That is the name used for the same item in the standard bash and zsh shells. HISTCMD is used in the new standard highlight macro described below.

Additional Geometry/Orientation Matrix Errors Made Non-Fatal

A number of errors associated with calculation of the orientation matrix for various diffractometer geometries are no longer fatal. That is, the errors no longer cause spec to stop execution and jump back to the command line prompt. Instead, the associated calc() call now returns an error. Possible errors are a zero lattice constant or lattice angle, a zero LAMBDA (incident wave-length), a zero length reflection or parallel reflections when calculating the orientation matrix from two reflections or failure to fit an orientation matrix from multiple reflections (for example, if the reflections are all in the same plane).

Most of the standard scan macros already check the return value of calcA (defined as calc(1) for all standard geometries and used to calculate motor positions from reciprocal space coordinates) and exit the scan or move if there is an error.

Update to USB-CTR Digital I/O Pins Access

When the Measurement Computing USB-CTR is used in "external-gate-select" mode, one to three of the eight digital I/O pins are reserved and used for gating the counter channels based on which channel is designated as the master counter. Previously, spec prevented changing the state of those pins at all times. Now it is possible to set and clear those pins except when actively counting. See the usbctr help file.

Fix For USB-CTR Time Presets Over 36 Minutes and Counters Over 32 Bits

It seems the Measurement Computer USB-CTR firmware does not allow time presets greater than 31 bits. With the timebase frequency set by spec to 1 megahertz, the maximum count time was a bit less than 36 minutes. The code now decreases the timebase frequency by a factor of ten for each factor of ten in the preset count time above 36 minutes, but only when the hardware config file sets the scale factor for the timebase to the recommended 1e6. If set to another value, spec assumes an external timebase. See the usbctr help file.

In addition, a bug where counter values greater than 32-bits were not converted correctly to count values in the S[] scaler array has been fixed.

New Tracking Option For EPICS PV Monitors

The "monitor_set" option to epics_par() now takes an optional argument that is a spec global variable or data array. When set, the value of the spec parameter will track the value of the EPICS process variable. See the epics help file for details.

Encoder Mode Update For Galil Motor Controllers

By default, the spec support for Galil motor controllers uses relative move commands for encoder motors (GALIL_E) and absolute move commands otherwise (GALIL). A new custom optional motor parameter "encoder_move_mode" can be assigned values "absolute" or "relative" to set what kind of moves to use for encoders. Use the p command from the standard Motor screen to access the custom parameter screen.

Errors Now Checked When Setting Newport XPS Speeds

spec will now return an error on starting a move or home search on an XPS controller if the PositionerSGammaParametersSet command returns an error when setting the velocity and acceleration. Previously, spec would consider the speeds had been set and proceed with the moves.

Updates For SPring-8 MADOCA Support

An issue where spec would query a MADOCA motor controller during hardware configuration if there were any motors configured to use the controller, even if the associated controller was set to "OFF" in the config file has been fixed. If the controller is unavailable, no MADOCA commands will be sent.

In addition, spec now rounds count times to the maximum two significant figures the standard MADOCA timer hardware supports. spec also will truncate count times to the maximum 990 seconds allowed. Warning messages are printed in each case. To disable count time adjustments for the less used MADOCA timers that don't have such constraints, set the nonstandard optional controller parameter "no_time_check" to a nonzero value from the Devices screen of the configuration editor.

New Region Of Interest Counter Macros

A new facility to create run-time region of interest (ROI) counters is now included with the standard macros. The macros work with any MCA- or image-type controller. Counters are created using the new counter_par() "add" function. The ROIs can be configured to return the sum, average, minimum or maximum values associated with the specified detector region. Multiple ROIs can be assigned to the same controller. A new roisetup macro uses the spec_menu() built-in function to provide a configuration screen. See the roi help file for details.

New highlight Macro Displays Matching Items From Command History

The standard macros now include a macro called highlight, which takes a single argument. The argument is a string or regular expression. The macro displays all items from the command line history which match the argument. The matches are displayed as highlighted text. The macro uses the new HISTCMD variable, the relatively new get_history() function, and the slightly less new match() and gsub() functions.

New Option For newfile Macro

When re-opening an existing data file, if the current scan number (SCAN_N) doesn't match the last scan number of the file, the newfile macro will now prompt whether to assign SCAN_N to continue the existing file scan numbering. In addition, if a -c argument (for "continue") is included on the newfile command line, the assignment will be made with no prompting, even if a different scan number was included on the macro command line.

New ub_default Macro To Reset Geometry Parameters

A new ub_default macro is available to reset geometry parameters to the default values they have after starting fresh. The parameters include the lattice constants and the HKL values, angles and associated energy of the primary and secondary orientation reflections.

New Implementation For Geometry Pseudo Angle Scans

The standard macros now include a utility macro called _pa_scan_prep that is used with a number of geometry macros to scan pseudo angles. Both regular and delta versions of the scans are included. The fourc, fivec and sixc geometries have aziscan and azidscan to scan the AZIMUTH pseudo angle. The zaxis geometry has alphascan and betascan, along with delta versions, to scan the ALPHA and BETA pseudo angles. The psic geometry includes alphascan for ALPHA, betascan for BETA, omscan (or thscan) for OMEGA, psiscan (or aziscan) for PSI, qazscan for QAZ and nazscan for NAZ along with delta versions for each. See the comments in the newscans.mac source file for details on how _pa_scan_prep works.

resume Macro Now Restores cleanup_once Macro

The resume macro that restarts scans that were interrupted (usually by a ^C) now restores the cleanup_once macro that was in effect at the time of interruption. For example, with delta scans, the cleanup_once macro returns motors to their positions at the start of the scan. Previously, if a delta scan was resumed, the cleanup action was lost and the motors would not be returned to starting positions.

splot Macros Simplified When Using the Python splot Utility

The draw_plot() macro function used by the splot macro no longer includes unnecessary calls of splot_cntl() to set PLOT_MODE parameters, as the splot utility gets those parameters from the meta region of the SCAN_D[] shared data array.

_dscan_cleanup Updated To Use move_info()

The _dscan_cleanup macro used by most of the delta scans to return scanned motors to positions held at the start of the scan now includes a call to move_info() to determine which motors need to be moved. This change eliminates messages about returning motors to a position they are already at, particularly in the case of the scans associated with the geometry pseudo angles introduced in this release.

Fly Scan Macros Updated

The fly scan macros have a number of updates and fixes, including a new configuration choice in fly_setup to select permitted fly scan motors and parameters for each. In addition, it is now possible to select channel advance behavior for the motorless fly scans, choosing either the internal clock (the default) or an external signal.

Fix For Using Array Column Numbers With splot and Related Macros

A problem in the internal macro _plot_replace_x() called by plot_defaults(), which is used by the pts, plot, splot, rplot and lp_plot macros, where optional arguments to specify array columns in SCAN_D could only be specified by mnemonic rather than column number, has been fixed. Now either mnemonic or column number can be usesd.

Fix For disable_undo Of the disable Macro Set

A small issue, where the saved state of disabled hardware could not be restored with a disable_undo after successful completion of a disable/enable command, has been fixed. See the disable help file for details on the macros.

New Option To Disallow Using Motor Numbers For Move Commands

The standard move macros (mv, umv, mvr, umvr, mvd, umvd, mvr2 and umvr2) traditionally allow motors to be specified by motor numbers in addition to mnemonics. In order to avoid one kind of typing error that results in moving a motor unintentionally, the mstartup (or startup) macros now offer the option to disallow using motor numbers to specify motors for those move commands. If the new global variable NO_MV_MOTNUM has a nonzero value, the macros will print an error message and exit if numbers are used instead of mnemonics. Note, though, variables are still allowed as long as they have been set to a value. Using an uninitialized variable to specify a motor has resulted in an error since spec release 6.05.01. The feature is off by default. Assign a nonzero value to NO_MV_MOTNUM in a local macro file such as site.mac in SPECD to enable the check for all users.

Fix For Crash On motor_par(mne, "?") In Some Configurations

For a small number of motor and scaler types, spec could crash if there was a motor or scaler configured but no corresponding controller configured, and the motor_par(mne, "?") or counter_par(mne, "?") functions were called. This was notably a problem with macro hardware motors and scalers, but also affected a handful of other controller types. The issue is now fixed.

Fix For Using Three Arguments With strdef()

A bug that prevented the three-argument invocation of the strdef() function has been fixed. The strdef() function returns the macro definition of its first argument. For cdef() chained macros, the second argument can specify a key to match cdef() segments. The last argument for both regular and cdef() macros can be an associative array that will be filled with the defined argument names if the macro is a macro function, along with an element called "file" that will be filled with the macro source location.

pyspec Updates

The pyspec directory included in the spec distribution and copied to the auxiliary file directory during installation contains Python tools used by several spec Python utilities. This spec release includes improved handling of timeouts with the pyspec.client modules used to communicate with a spec server. In addition, issues with initialization of pyspec.client SpecServer objects and with the pyspec.client examples have been fixed.

splot Updates

splot now supports defining regions of interest (ROI) counters on 2D plots. These ROIs work with the new roi macros in spec, but only when running spec in server mode, as in spec -S.

The 2D plots now include a button to select aspect ratio either as "auto" to fill the available screen space or "equal" to maintain the native aspect ratio.

splot now uses the "meta" information of shared spec data arrays to set ranges and labels for 1D and 2D plots.

The 2D colormap selection is improved.

splot now includes a work around for a known bug with certain versions of PyQt on MacOS.

Issues associated with splot's server interface are fixed.

eiger_server Updates

This spec releases includes a number of improvements and updates to the Dectris Eiger 2D detector support. The Eiger macros now do the programming of the detector parameters (which can be a slow process) before the first scan point in order to avoid impacting the collection time associated with the first scan data point.

When saving HDF5 format data, the macros now generate one HDF5 master file per scan.

The Eiger server now recognizes the move_cnt command used by spec powder mode scans.

The high-performance collection mode has been further optimized, and is now selectable from the eiger_menu macro. See the eiger help file for details on the limitations of collection mode.

Issues With splot To spec Server Communication Fixed

Problems with the recently refactored version of the Python spec client library included in spec release 6.09.10 resulted in issues with the connection from the splot utility to a spec server. Commands from splot, such as initiating a move or scan from the splot server panel, didn't work properly, and splot didn't exit quickly when spec sent a quit message. Those problems have been fixed with updates to the library (install location is SPECD/pyspec/client) and splot.

Fix For Closing Server Connections

On some platforms under certain conditions, a spec client could start racing when a connected server exited. That problem should now be fixed.

Fix For fscan/fdscan Bug

The file scan (fscan) macro in spec release 6.09.01 included updates to implement a delta-position scan (fdscan), but there were a couple of bugs that prevented the file scans from working at all. That issue is now fixed. fscan and fdscan are scans that take motor positions and optional count times from a file.

Fix For getline() Bug

A bug associated with the updated capabilities for the getline() function introduced with spec release 6.09.05 has been fixed. The bug was that the value for the current line number of the input file was not reset when the file was closed or a different file was accessed without explicitly using the "open" argument. Thus, the wrong line number would be read from the new file, or an end-of-file could be returned if the new file had only one line. Specifying the line number explicitly or using the "open" argument with a new file did not have an issue.

Fix For lsdef and prdef Globbing

The expanded globbing introduced in spec release 6.07.01 that added support for the [...] metacharacter pattern for several built-in commands did not work with the lsdef and prdef command as intended. It works now.

New "type" array_op() Option

The "type" argument to the array_op() function now returns a string that represents the data type of the array. For example, array_op("type", SCAN_D) returns the string "double". See the arrays help file for details.

Assignment Now Allowed With global and local Declarations

The declarations global and local now allow initialization in the statement. For example,

local tmp[] = [ 1, 2, 3 ]
global VAR = 1.234
global arr[] = [ "one":1, "two":2, "three":3 ]

Note, only one variable per statement can be declared and initialized using this syntax. (Associative array initialization was introduced in spec release 6.06.01.)

Updates For splot

This release includes bug fixes and stability improvements for the Python splot utility.

Fix For _assign_mA Macro

An unfortunate bug introduced in spec release 6.09.07 that broke the _assign_mA macro that is used with the spec HKL geometry configurations is fixed. That macro fills the global mA[] associative array with motor numbers putting the diffractometer motors first in the list. The _assign_mA macro is called by way of the geometry-dependent _assign macro called within the standard config macro. The bug did not affect geometry-less configurations or configurations where the geometry motors were the first motors in the config file.

Updates For flyscan Macros

The fly scan macros include several fixes and additions. A new user_flyscan_trigger hook is called immediately after starting the MCS. The MCS data is now read before the call to fly_chk_beam so that the data so obtained can be used in any beam-check considerations. For unidirectional mesh fly scans, the fly motor backlash is restored for each move back to the starting position. An oversight where the absolute value of the motor_par() "step_size" parameter was not used has been fixed. See the flyscan help file.

Fix For prompt_mac Deletion On ^C

An issue introduced in spec release 6.06.01, where prompt_mac was deleted on ^C, is now fixed. See the macros help file for a description of prompt_mac.

Fix For array_copy() Shared Memory Notification

A bug where the array_copy() function did not update the shared memory utime counter when copying to a shared array has been fixed. Utilities that check for updated values, such as spec's splot, use that counter to tell when array contents have been updated. See the spec_shm.h and sps.c files included in the spec distribution.

New "reopen" ser_par() Option

It is now possible to close and reopen an ordinary serial device configured for generic user-level access without having to run reconfig. The command ser_par(addr, "reopen") will close and attempt to reopen the serial device configured at addr. Such a capability is not normally needed, but may be useful for certain poorly behaved interfaces. The serial device parameters previously set, such as baud rate, parity, "raw" versus "cooked", etc., will be restored. This option only acts on UNIX serial devices and returns zero if successful and -1 if not. Does nothing and returns zero for SOCKET, EPICS and TACO serial interfaces. See the serial help file.

Updates For splot

The Python splot utility now includes support for live-time display of 2D images. In addition, fly scan plotting issues have been fixed along with fixes for other minor issues.

Improvements For USBCTR MCS Mode

A few tweaks to the timeout and packet size used with the Measurement Computing USBCTR in the MCS mode used by spec's fly scan macros have resulted in more robust operation. See the usbctr help file.

Update For USB-CTR flyscan Macros

The "trigger" support in the flyscan macros when using the Measurement Computing USB-CTR has been straightened out. What was previously referred to as "DIO bit for trigger" is now more properly referred to as "DIO bit to use for gating", in that the DIO bit (if selected) is set at the start of the pass and cleared at the end of the pass and can be used to gate an external device. In addition, a new option "external trigger to start pass" can be selected from the fly_setup macro to use the trigger input on the USB-CTR to start the pass. Choices are "off", "low", "high", "falling" and "rising" referring to the kind of signal presented to the input. See the flyscan help file.

Fixes To _tail and scan_meta_update() For Fly Scans

The standard macros _tail and scan_meta_update() include updates that accommodate fly scan plotting using the splot utility.

Fix For Crash With "disable" Option To motor_par() and counter_par()

An old bug that became problematical in spec release 6.09.05 where it could result in a crash when using the "disable" option to counter_par() or motor_par() with certain hardware configurations has been fixed.

New "move_timeout" Parameter

A new optional "move_timeout" parameter is available to have spec abort moves or home sequences that do not complete within a specified timeout interval. Such a feature might be useful during unattended operation of an instrument when, for example, a motor with encoder becomes physically blocked and unable to complete a requested move while the controller continues to generate steps.

The parameter can be set four ways. Each method given takes precedence over the prior method. First, a global spec_par("move_timeout") value can be set that will apply to all motors. Second, a "move_timeout" nonstandard optional controller parameter can be set in the config file that will apply to all motors associated with the controller. Third, a "move_timeout" nonstandard optional motor parameter can be set for individual motors in the config file. Finally, motor_par(mne, "move_timeout") can be used during a spec session to set the value for a single motor. Values set with motor_par() will be lost on start up and reconfig. A value set with spec_par() will be saved in the state file.

Units for "move_timeout" are seconds. Fractional values are allowed. If a move or home sequence doesn't complete in the time given, all current moves will be aborted and spec will reset, just as if a hard limit had been hit.

Fix For Possible Crash With TMCL Motors

The source of occasional segmentation faults on configuration when using Trinamic TMCL motors has been found and fixed. The issue appeared with spec release 6.09.01 which included support for additional TMCL models.

ascan and dscan Can Now Take Multiple Motor Arguments

The standard ascan and dscan macros will now accept an unlimited number of "motor start end" arguments before the number of intervals and count-time arguments. The macros a2scan through a5scan and d2scan through d5scan still exist and do require the number of motors to match the digit in the macro name.

Updates For eiger_server

The support for the Dectris Eiger detectors through spec's eiger_server hardware server facility includes fixes and improvements. See the eiger help file for current capabilities.

Updates For splot

This release includes bug fixes and stability improvements for the Python splot utility.

New Option To Show Motors On Screen During HKL Scans

It is now possible to show geometry motors on the screen during reciprocal space scans. The mstartup and startup macros will prompt for which motors to include.

Improved Screen Formatting For Scans

The standard scans now do a more consistent job of filling the available screen row with counters beyond the always shown main detector and monitor channels. The width per counter column is adjusted from 8 to 11 characters based on the available space. In addition, if the window size is changed mid scan, the number of columns displayed and their width is dynamically recalculated. Also the column headers will be redisplayed. These changes are part of the standard _head and _loop macros. If local spec administrators have replaced one or both of these macros (not recommended), the local versions need to be reconciled with the standard versions.

Fix For cleanup_once In Server Mode

A long standing bug, where cleanup_once would not run if there was an error in a command sent from a client to a spec server, has been fixed.

Fix For CANbus Bit Rate In config File

An issue where the hardware configuration editor might not read the CANbus bit rate correctly from the config file has been fixed.

Stability Improvements For Python Tools

The Python code for the splot and eiger_server utilities includes fixes and improvements.

New Multi-line getline() Options

The built-in getline() function now supports options to read a specific line in the input file and also to read a range of lines at once. The beginning of the range can either be the current position or a specified line number. The end of the range can be specified as a line number, the first line that matches a regular expression or all lines to the end of the file. See getline in the funcs help file.

savstate Will Now Execute Within Statement Blocks

Previously, the savstate built-in command would only set an internal flag to indicate the action was requested. The actual saving of the state didn't occur until spec returned to the main prompt. spec will now write out the state file at the point at which the command occurs.

Updated Behavior For quit Command

Previously the quit command to exit spec (same as ^D typed at the main prompt) was only allowed at the beginning of a line either typed on the keyboard or read from a command file. The command could not be included in a macro. With this release, quit is now an ordinary command that can be included in macros, flow control statement, etc. A new "legacy_quit" spec_par() option is available to restore the old behavior. See the spec_par help file.

New mainloop_mac For Controlling Access To spec Commands

If there is a macro called mainloop_mac, that macro will be run instead of spec prompting for input. The intention of this macro is to provide site administrators a tool to limit what commands are available to users. The macro should prompt the user for input and act on that input. Unless the macro includes an option to undefine itself, the macro will run forever. The macro is undefined automatically when spec exits, either by quit or ^\ (quit signal). See the macros help file for more information.

Error Message Now Printed If Concatenation Used In Function Arguments

The concatenation operator comes into effect when expressions are combined separated only by space characters. The resulting expression is the concatenation of the string values of the constituent expressions. Concatenation is only allowed on the right side of an assignment operator, in the arguments to the print and eprint commands and in the value assigned to a variable in a constant statement. Previously, concatenated expressions in arguments to functions used as terms where concatenation is allowed were not flagged as errors.

New SPEC_PID Built-In Global Variable

A new immutable global variable SPEC_PID contains the process ID of the spec process.

Fix For Setting Powder-Mode Parameters In config File

A long standing issue where the powder-mode parameters "powder_base", "powder_slew" and "powder_acceleration" could not be set as nonstandard optional parameters in the config file has been fixed. The parameters could be set during a spec session with motor_par(). The values for "powder_base" and "powder_slew" still default to the base rate and "powder_acceleration" to the acceleration value from the config file.

Fix For TMCL Parameter Restore Feature

The code that restores TMCL motor parameters on detection of a power cycle has been tuned to ensure that there will be no movement of the motor when the actual position and the target position registers are restored.

Fix For New Signal Handling

An issue with the revised signal handling introduced in spec release 6.09.01, where the hardware abort code and cleanup macros might not be execute on a ^C interrupt during a sleep(), has been fixed.

Eiger2 Now Supported

The eiger_server code used with spec's server hardware facility now supports the Dectris Eiger2 model that uses version 1.8.0 of the SIMPLON API. See the eiger and server_hdw help files for details.

Fix For sixc Gamma Position

A bug introduced in spec release 6.08.06 in the sixc geometry code that affected configurations with no geometry pseudomotors has been fixed. The issue was that the position for the Gamma motor after a calcA was not restored after a read_motors().

Fix For TMCL Support

A bug introduced in spec release 6.09.01 that could lead to a crash when using a TMCL motor that didn't have the "home_slew_rate" parameter set has been fixed.

New rpi_io() Function To Access GPIO Pins On Raspberry PI

This spec release includes a new rpi_io() function for the Raspberry PI platform to allow access to the general purpose I/O (GPIO) pins. See the rpi help file for details. Note, spec has been available for the Raspberry PI running Raspian Linux since spec release 6.03.01 from February 2015.

Stability Improvements For Python Tools

The Python code for the eiger_server and splot utilities include some fixes and improvements.

New user_pregetcounts Hook

The standard get_counts macro, which is the lowest level counter reading macro, now includes a user hook macro user_pregetcounts, which is called before the built-in getcounts command. The existing user hook user_getcounts is called immediately after getcounts. Both user_getcounts and user_pregetcounts are defined as null macros by default.

Update For Standard EPICS Scaler Record Support

spec now uses a ca_put_callback() to set the CNT process variable to begin counting. With this method, the standard scaler record will send an event for CNT after counting is finished and after final value events have been sent for all associated scaler channels. Previously, spec relied on regular callback events when the value of CNT changed to zero to signal the end of counting. It seems that method doesn't guarantee that all scaler channel final value events arrive before the CNT event.

More Robust Signal Handling

The signal handling code associated with a keyboard ^C has been reorganized to correct a potential source of crashes. As spec evolved, the actions taken on a ^C interrupt became more complex. In particular, with the addition of macro hardware and spec server functionality, interrupt handling code sometimes included calls of the C library memory allocation functions. Those function are not re-entrant. If a ^C came while spec was in those functions, a call to the same functions from the signal handling code could cause spec to crash. Although the bug has been present for a long time, it was very rarely seen. CSS has no user reports associated with this bug, but the issue was seen with in house testing.

In this release of spec, the interrupt handling does nothing more than set a flag. That flag is examined at key check points in the code, and if set the appropriate actions are taken (stopping motors, resetting to the main prompt, etc.). There should be no point where a ^C fails to break out of a loop, but it is possible some loop was missed. Please report any anomalies to CSS.

Reorganized File Hierarchy To Support Python Utilities

The spec auxiliary file directory (normally /usr/local/lib/spec.d) now contains a subdirectory called pyspec which currently includes utility packages used by the Python splot utility, the eiger_server hardware server program, and the specfile utility.

Support For Python 3

The Python-based spec utilities (splot, eiger_serve*, specfile) now work with Python 3. The programs will use Python 3 if available, otherwise Python 2 will be used.

Python Library and Examples For Connecting To a spec Server

The Python modules used by the splot utility to connect to a spec server are now located in the new pyspec subdirectory of the spec auxiliary file directory. The source files and examples are included in the spec distribution directory under pyspec/python/client. The examples create graphical widgets that can interact with a spec server.

New Delta File Scan Macros

A new fdscan macro works similarly to the fscan macro. Both take motor positions (and possibly count times) from a file. With fscan the file positions are absolute motor positions. For fdscan, the positions in the file are taken as offsets from the motor positions at the start of the scan.

Fix For Screen Display Of Integer Counts

A change in spec release 6.08.05 to no longer round significant figures of integer counter readings for the screen display of updated counting and count values during scans had the unintended consequence of limiting values to 32-bit signed integers. That problem has been fixed by changing the format from "%d" to "%.0f".

Problems With cbreak-mode input() Fixed

When the input() function is called with a numerical argument less than zero, the tty state is set to cbreak mode, input echo is turned off and the state remains in that mode until a call of input() with a positive numerical argument or if spec returns to the main prompt. A bug introduced with spec release 6.06.04 that implemented use of the command-line editing library for the input(), yesno(), getval() and getsval() could lead to issues with the tty state if one of those functions was called while the tty state was in cbreak mode. For example, consider the following:

for (;;) {
     key = input(-1)
     if (key == "x")
             val = getval("Enter", val)
     sleep(.1)
}

If getval() call is made, the tty state would not be properly restored to the expected cbreak mode for the next input() call. That issue has been fixed.

In addition, a problem where ^C (interrupt signal) and ^\ (quit signal) were disabled while cbreak mode was active has been fixed.

Support For Thorlabs LTS150/LTS300 APT Motor Controllers

spec now supports the LTS150 and LTS300 models of Thorlabs APT controller over USB. Support for additional models will be added as needed. See the thorlabs help file for details.

Support For Trinamic TMCL-6210 Motor Controllers

The initial spec support for Trinamic TMCL motor controllers was tested with models TMCM-1140 and TMCM-3110. This release adds support for model TMCM-6210. Support for other models will be added as needed or requested. See the tmcl help file.

Support For Dectris Eiger Detectors

spec now includes Python-based support for the Dectris Eiger detectors using the server hardware facility. See the eiger and server_hdw help files for details.

Updated "sort" and New "merge" Options For array_op()

For a 2D array, the array_op() "sort" option will sort the array by rows. Previously, the option would sort a 2D array as if it were a 1D array and distribute the sorted elements in consecutive rows. Now the array will be sorted by rows, either by the value in the first column, or in the column specified by an optional argument.

A new "merge" option combines rows of an array where values in the same column in adjacent rows are the same or within a specified threshold. This feature can be used in combining overlapping scans.

See the arrays help file for more information.

Allow Up To Nine x11filt Windows

The number of allowed x11filt windows has been increased from five to nine.

New "text" Item For spec_menu() and ^G Command

A new "text" item is available to insert a block of text within the menu. A new ^G command will jump to the first item of the menu. See the spec_menu help file for details.

Improved Handling Of Write Errors To Sockets and Pipes

spec now does a better job in handling errors when writing to a socket or a pipe (to x11filt or data_pipe() processes) that has been closed at the other end.

Automatic Removal Of Unnecessary Quotes In prop_watch()

The prop_watch() property string for associative array elements should not contain quotes around the array index. spec will now automatically remove such quotes when registering the property with a spec server if the user has inadvertently included them.

splot Updates

The Python splot utility is now release 3.3.01. Changes include refreshed icons and stability improvements, and partial support for Python 3.

New umoveE Macro

The standard energy macros now include a umoveE macro that has the same syntax as moveE but will display the monochromator motor positions and energy during the move. A new internal _updateE macro, an updated _update() macro and new _numE and mE[] global variables are part of the implementation.

Configurable Units For Energy Macros

The units for the standard energy macros, getE, setE, calcM, moveE, umoveE and Escan, can now be configured as either eV or keV. Previously, the units were fixed as keV. The value is stored in a new global variable, E_mult (for energy multiplier). A value of 1 corresponds to keV. A value of 1000 corresponds to eV. The units can be configured in the mstartup macro or by setting the appropriate value to E_mult.

New MCA Scan Macros

This spec distribution includes macros to perform detector-arm scans that take MCA data at a range of positions that provide full scan coverage at the resolution of the MCA pixels. Currently, the macros are not installed by default. See the file macros/mca_scans.mac in the spec distribution. Use mca_scan_setup to configure the macros mca_ascan and mca_dscan.

Fix For Internal sdata_plot() Macro For Column-Wise Arrays

The sdata_plot() internal macro that is called by splot and the other plotting macros will now work correctly with column-wise arrays. In declaring two-dimensional arrays, the first dimension is rows, the second is columns. By default, the "wise-ness" is set based on which dimension is bigger. For example, if there are more rows than columns, the array will be row wise. However, array_op() options can be used to force the "wise-ness". The standard macros set the data array, SCAN_D, to be row wise. The macros that use SCAN_D are written accordingly. With this update, the splot macro will now also work with column-wise arrays.

Old sscanf() Bug Fixed

The oldest bug on record, dating to the introduction of the sscanf() function in spec release 3.00.06 in December 1993, has been fixed. The issue was that a minus sign immediately following integer digits would make the scanned value negative. For example, the following statement:

{ sscanf("123-xyz", "%d-%s", num, str); p num, str }

would previously show this incorrect output:

-123 xyz

With the fix the correct result:

123 xyz

is produced.

Fix For sixc Fresh Start Pseudo Motor Calculation

A missed divide-by-zero check in the recently added pseudo motor code for the sixc geometry that resulted in motor discrepancy messages on a fresh start before the geometry parameters used in the calculation had been set has been fixed.

Support For Modbus

spec now includes preliminary support for Modbus TCP, RTU and ASCII protocols via the fbus_put() and fbus_get() functions. See the new fbus help file for details.

Fix For Struck SIS3820 Monitor Preset Channel

A bug dating from the original support for the Struck SIS3820 32-channel counter/timer where none of the upper 16 channels would work as a monitor preset channel has been fixed.

Preliminary Support For Dectris Eiger

Preliminary support for the Dectris Eiger detector is included via the server hardware feature. See the eiger help file for more information.

New Option For split()

If the optional third argument to the built-in split() function is the null string, "", the first argument will be split at each character. See the split() entry in the funcs help file.

New Features and Fixes For spec_menu()

The "@" key can now be used with "bit" items, but only for retrieving a value. Initial values are still set through the modes argument. In addition, the choices key for the "toggle" item can now take more than two choices. Also, an issue where the "@" key might not be effective when used for the same item that had "value" or "svalue" keys, depending on the order in which the items appeared in the menu array, has been fixed. See the spec_menu help file.

Updated Defaults For x11filt

The default settings for x11filt have been switched to use a retained pixmap rather than backing store. These options are for two different methods of having the window redrawn when exposed. The backing store setting was the original default as it required less memory and CPU cycles, which was a valid consideration in the early days of spec. However, the retained pixmap method is more reliable. Not all of the many window managers that now exist implement backing store support in a way that always works with the code in x11filt. See the x11 help file.

Install Creates a SPECD/macros Directory

The standard installation will now create a directory called macros in SPECD (usually /usr/local/lib/spec.d). If a file or directory by that name already exists, it is not an error. Existing files will not be removed. In addition, the global variable DO_DIR, which can be a colon-separated list of directories in which to look for command files, will be initialized with that path when starting fresh. The hardware servers that include command files containing macro definitions will have those files installed in the new macros directory when a make install is run in the spec distribution servers directory.

Fix For Start-Up -T Flag

A bug, introduced in spec release 6.06.01 (May 2017), where the state file associated with the "fake" tty argument to the -T start-up option was not used when writing the state file, has been fixed. The designated "fake" tty state file will now be used to both initialize the state and save the state on exit (or with the savstate command).

Fix For sixc setlen Macro

A recently introduced bug for the sixc geometry macros, where the setlen macro didn't work for the "pseudo-gamma" configuration that has gamR and gamT motors, has been fixed.

Fix For Server Hardware Instability

An issue with memory allocation for server hardware arguments has been fixed. The symptoms could include the server failing to start and/or memory corruption.

Fix For Updated MCAS and CCDS Meaning

spec release 6.08.05 revised the meaning for the MCAS and CCDS global variables to facilitate looping through all configured devices. With that release, the values are set to one greater than the highest numbered device, rather than to the number of devices. That accommodates non-consecutive device numbering. In that recent release, the value was still 1 if there were no devices configured. With this release, if there are no associated devices, the value of the respective variable will be zero.

New Server Hardware Support For greateyes Cameras

This spec release includes initial code, macros and a help file for the greateyes cameras, which can be used over USB or ethernet. The files are in the servers subdirectory of the spec distribution. See the greateyes help file for details.

New "goodbye" Message For Server Hardware

The server hardware protocol now includes spec sending a "goodbye" message before disconnecting the socket to the server. See the server_hdw help file for details.

Subaddress Allowed For Image Devices

The same subaddress syntax available with the mca_spar(), mca_sget() and mca_sput() functions can now be used with image_par(), image_get() and image_put(). The only built-in hardware support that current makes use of the subaddress for image devices is the server hardware pseudo device. The subaddresses, when used, will be passed to the associated server. For the listed functions, the address argument may be given as 0.0, 0.1, 0.2, ..., where the first digit is the unit number from the config file, and the digit right of the decimal point is the subaddress. The argument can be entered as number or a string. The syntax "0:0", "0:1", "0:2", ..., is also recognized, where the arguments for each module are strings.

Updates For Delta Tau Motor Controller Support

The built-in support for the Delta Tau motor controllers has been updated. spec no longer programs values for motor parameters Ix15, Ix19 and Ix21. Values for these I variables can be set as nonstandard optional motor parameters in the config file. Otherwise, values in controller memory will be used. spec now allows a zero acceleration time to be programmed as motor controller parameter Ix20 for this controller, in which case it is important to insure the Ix21 S-curve time parameter has a non-zero value. In addition, if the standard optional motor parameter "home_method" is set, spec will send that string when doing a home search.

spec now recognizes a nonstandard optional controller parameter named "init_sequence". Its value can be one or more commands separated by semicolons. Each command will be sent to the controller during hardware configuration.

Also, new nonstandard optional motor parameters "nudge_time" and "nudge_sequence" are available to deal with avoiding fatal following errors when moving a motor that hasn't moved recently. The parameter "nudge_time" can be set to the number of seconds between moves before spec will send nudge commands before moving the motor. The parameter "nudge_sequence" is a string containing a semicolon-delimited list of commands to send before starting the move to the destination.

Fix For Possible epics_get() Retry Anomaly

A possible crash when spec retries epics_get() commands after a timeout when a connection has dropped has been fixed.

More Robust State File

When saving the state information either at exit or with the savstate command, spec will now fully write out a new state file with a name ending in ".new" before renaming the new file to replace the the previous. In addition, the previous state file will be maintained with a suffix ".old". If on start up, the standard state file is missing or corrupted, spec will attempt to read from a ".new" file, if it exists. If it doesn't, spec will try to read from the ".old" file. The same procedure is followed for the command-line history file. These changes should greatly reduce the already small chances of a corrupt state file forcing spec to start fresh. A state file could become corrupted if a computer is shutdown or spec is killed while the state file was in the process of being written.

Fix For sixc Pseudo Motors With Tracking Off

When tracking is off for calculational pseudo motors, moving the pseudo motor should not change the positions of the associated real motors and vice versa. The sixc geometry code has been fixed to make sure that is the case.

Fix For Enabling Multiple PCI Boards Of the Same Type

Some Linux systems are configured so that access to PCI board I/O ports and memory registers is disabled by default on boot with the expectation that kernel drivers will enable access if the PCI board is to be used. spec driverless support for PCI boards also enables access. A bug that only enabled access to the first board when multiple boards of the same type were installed has been fixed.

Support For SPring-8 MADOCA Request Server Layer

The SPring-8 "equipment manager" RPC layer support added to spec in 1999 has been updated to also support the "request server" socket layer. In addition, the naming has been changed to MADOCA to reflect the naming conventions used at SPring-8. The built-in em_io() function has been renamed madoca_io(). An em_io is now included in the standard macros (defined simply as madoca_io) to maintain backward compatibility with existing local macros. See the madoca help file (formerly named equipman) for details.

New save_state Macro To Aid In Diagnostics

The new standard macro save_state invokes the utility show_state (included with the spec package) to write the current state file contents along with config and settings file information, all in human readable format, to either the file specified by an optional argument or to a file beginning with the name /tmp/state. Such a file can be useful at CSS for diagnosing or debugging user issues.

New tolower() and toupper() Functions

New string manipulation functions tolower() and toupper() are available to change the case of strings. Optional arguments provide a character count and starting position. See the funcs help file for details.

New Position Argument To asc()

The asc() function, which returns the ASCII value of the first character of the string argument, now accepts an optional second argument to specify a position within the string rather than the first character. Positions are counted from 1. See the funcs help file for details.

New "every" Option to array_op()

A new array_op() "every" option returns every n-th element of a data array. See the arrays help file for details.

Improvements to spec_menu()

A new "alist" key allows selecting multiple items from a list. The list of items must be passed as an associative array. A new "bracket" key allows specifying the bracket characters that indicate selections made with the "list" and "alist" keys. All the descriptive text can now include special text formatting strings for bold, underline, etc. See the spec_menu help file for details.

The show_state Utility Will Attempt To Find Associated Files

The show_state utility presents information not only from the user state file but also from the associated history, config and settings files. When invoked with an explicit state file argument, the locations of the other files are not necessarily known, so the command output doesn't include those elements. With this release of spec, if the file argument to show_state includes the userfiles/ path component, the command will try to locate the associated files based on that path. That is, if the history file is in the same directory as the state file and if the config and settings files are at the same level as userfiles, show_state will find them.

Interruptible Socket Connect

spec uses a four-second timeout when attempting to connect to a socket. That timeout can now be interrupted with a ^C, both with user-level socket commands and hardware initialization from the config file. While initializing hardware from the config file, processing will continue as if the attempt to open the socket failed. During the user-level socket calls, the ^C will jump back to the command prompt, as usual.

Additional Check For Socket Lost Connection

spec will now take notice when a socket connection has been dropped by a server when doing a read of an associated socket. Some spec hardware support recognizes a lost connection and will attempt to reconnect. This check is an addition to the existing tests for lost connections.

Updated Meaning For MCAS and CCDS Global Variables

Previously, the values of the built-in MCAS and CCDS global variables were set to the number of 1D and 2D devices in the hardware config file. If all device numbers were used, one could loop from zero to the value of the corresponding global variable to access all configured devices. If an intermediate device number was unused, such a loop would not address all the devices. The values of MCAS and CCDS are now set to one greater than the highest device number to facilitate such loops.

Updated Behavior For Certain mca_spar() and image_par() Commands

The options "controller", "responsive" and "device_id" to the mca_spar() and image_par() commands will no longer print an error message if the device is unconfigured. For unconfigured devices, the functions will return the string "Unconfigured" for "controller", the value 0 for "responsive" and the value -1 for "device_id". In each case, HDW_ERR will be set to the value 6, which corresponds to trying to access unconfigured hardware. (See the HDW_ERR help file.) Note, that the "unusable" option to the commands still returns a zero or one to indicate whether a given device is available and usable and also does not print a message.

Macro Hardware Timer/Counter Improvement

If no channels are active for a particular macro hardware timer/counter controller due to all configured channels being unresponsive or disabled, spec will no longer send the "prestart_all" and "preread_all" commands to the associated _cmd macro.

Fix For Struck SIS3820 Reset

Previously spec issued a reset command before programming the Struck SIS3820 for each counting interval. The reset produced an undesirable short spike on the enable signal. The reset command has been replaced by appropriate commands to prepare the device for a new counting cycle.

New MCS Support For Struck SIS3820

spec now supports the multi-channel scaling (MCS) capabilities of the Struck SIS3820 VME Scaler. See the sis3820 help file. spec flyscan macros have been updated to include support for the SIS3820. See the updated flyscan help file.

Fix For USB-CTR MCS Pass Sums

A bug with the recently added support for multi-channel scaling (MCS) with the Measurement Computing USB-CTR counter/timer, where the sum of channels accumulated over multiple MCS passes was not done correctly, has been fixed. Note that for fly scans, which were the impetus for adding the MCS capability, only one pass is made, so the bug was not an issue.

Fix For Halting Trinamic TMCL Limit Searches

An issue, where a ^C or stop() command wouldn't stop a chg_dial() "lim+" or "lim-" search on a Trinamic TMCL motor controller, has been fixed.

Fix For Possible Crash When Reading From a spec Server

Under some conditions, a timeout while attempting to read a message from a spec server could cause a segmentation fault. That issue is fixed.

Improved Display With Updated Counting During Scans

The screen display of updated counting during scans will no longer round significant figures of integer counter readings.

New Options For uct Display

The setshow macro for setting certain parameters for displaying motor and counter information now has two additional options for configuring the updated counting display associated with the uct macro. The counter mnemonics can now be displayed. A blank line can now be inserted between each set of counter rows.

Updated flyscan Macros

The flyscan macros now support the Struck SIS3820 VME Scaler as the MCS device, along with the existing support for the Measurement Computing USB-CTR. In addition, the optional normalization function is more robust with respect to normalization channels that might contain zeroes.

No Longer Limit Capabilities If root User

spec release 6.05.01 replaced the set-userid-root method of allowing the spec executable access to privileged I/O (such as PCI card registers for hardware control) with use of the Linux capabilities facility. Privileges are only enabled briefly around the calls that gain access. After gaining access, the code releases the capabilities, even if the real user ID was the all-privileged root user. One of the needed capabilities is "dac override" for discretionary access control, i.e., file permissions. When spec disabled that capability, even the root user would lose access to permission-protected files and directories. With this spec release, if the real user ID is that of root, the executable does not manipulate the Linux capabilities at all. Note, CSS does not recommend running spec or even a shell as the root user as normal operating procedure due to the possibility of doing catastrophic damage to the operating system with a single mistyped command.

Fix For Possible Buffer Overflow In array_dump()

Previously, if the optional element format for the array_dump() command specified a too-large format width (for example "%5000g"), there could be a buffer overflow leading to a subsequent crash. That bug has been fixed in this release. In addition, the field width for a single element is now limited to 4096 characters.

edconf String Editing Fixes

An issue with the edconf hardware configuration editor introduced in spec release 6.08.02, where the delete character and the delete to the beginning of the line character when entered in the middle of a string would erase to the end of the string, has been fixed.

edconf Default Limits Fix

Traditionally, when motors were added to the config file using the edconf hardware configuration editor, default values for limits were set to -180 and 180. Recent changes to implement 64-bit motor positions inadvertently caused the default limit values to be set to zero for newly added motors. This release restores the traditional behavior.

Another Fix For Escan fixQ Mode

When the Escan macro was rewritten to use the new array-based scan engine in spec release 6.03.08, the implicit calculation of H, K and L from current motor positions via the scan_head call was overlooked, with the result that if geometry motors were moved prior to the Escan, the HKL used in fixQ mode would not necessarily be the HKL associated with the motor positions at the start of the scan. This spec release includes an updated Escan macro that restores the traditional and expected behavior by including an explicit calcHKL call.

Fix For eval2() Replacement

The update in spec release 6.08.02 that replaced the now deprecated eval2() function with a call of eval() with the new optional flags "reset_on_error, local_visible" was mishandled. The eval2() call was replaced with a macro function called eval_arg(). However, macro functions always hide local variables defined outside the macro function, thus defeating the purpose of the "local_visible" flag. This spec release replaces the macro function with a direct call of eval() that includes the flags "reset, local" (the alternative short form names).

New "prestatus_all" and "preread_all" Commands For Macro Hardware Counters

To accommodate macro hardware counter configurations where hardware reads multiple channels with a single command, the macro hardware facility now implements "prestatus_all" and "preread_all" commands that can be used to create simpler macro hardware implementations. See the mac_hdw help file for details.

Additional Enhancements For edconf

The ^F and ^B keys can now be used to page through the nonstandard optional parameters screens of motor controllers and counter/timers. In addition, a new help screen describes the value-editing special commands.

Updates To New sixc Geometry Configurations

The new six-circle geometry configurations introduced in spec release 6.07.07 have been updated in order to provide more fine-tuned control over the pseudo motor tracking. See the sixc help file for details.

Support For %a, %A and %F Formatting In printf() Functions

The printf(), fprintf() and sprintf() built-in functions now recognize the %a and %A conversion specifiers, which print float and double values using a hexadecimal notation including an exponent. The %F format is identical to %f and is included for compatibility with the standard C library syntax. See a UNIX/Linux manual page for the printf() function for details on the conversions.

Updates For Trinamic TMCL Controllers

spec will now, by default, automatically check for a power cycle on the Trinamic TMCL controllers and will restore positions and motion parameters if needed. In addition, reading the controller is more robust, with an automatic retry of commands that have a checksum error in the reply. Also, if the "check_interval" optional parameter is set to -1, power-cycle detection will be disabled. See the tmcl help file for details.

New ANC150 and Updated ANC300 Support

Support for the Attocube ANC300 piezo controller has been updated for more robust error handling and to display estimated positions during updated moves, based on the step frequency and elapsed time. When a move is aborted, spec will estimate the current position at the point that the move was halted. In addition, the configured slew rate will be used to program the step frequency (using the controller's setf command). Support for the similar Attocube ANC150 has also been added to spec (although that model controller is out of production). See the new anc help file for more information.

Updated Mythen Support

spec can now load the user-defined flatfield arrays supported by Mythen firmware 4.1.0. The mca_par("flatfield") command now takes options of either a spec data array or a file that contains the array. In addition, a new "flatfield_slot" command can be used to specify which user-defined array to use. See the mythen help file for details.

Fix For phyMOTION Module Numbering

An issue with the Phytron phyMOTION support, where motor controllers installed to the right of any other module types (power supplies, I/O modules) in a phyMOTION crate were not correctly addressed, has been fixed.

Interruptible Firmware Load With USB-CTR

The Measurement Computing USB-CTR counter/timer requires a firmware upload whenever the device is powered up. It takes almost 15 seconds to send the firmware to the device. The loading process can now be interrupted with a ^C. The firmware will still need to be loaded in order to use the device, but one will not be stuck waiting if there is something else that needs to be done first.

Links With EPICS Release 7

spec will now link with EPICS release 7, in addition to releases 13, 14, 15 and 16. The release number used is selected at spec install time, based on the value of the epics_home parameter in spec's install_data file. The epics_home parameter contains the path to the folder containing the EPICS channel access libraries that will be linked with spec.

Fix To Reset Plotting Parameters With Disabled Counters

An issue associated with plotting when counters have been disabled has been fixed. The plotselect (or similar counters) macro assigns a value to the PL_Y1 global variable that points to the column of interest in the SCAN_D data array for plotting and analysis. If counters are disabled or enabled after the value is assigned, the columns in SCAN_D may no longer match the column chosen for PL_Y1. The scan_data_init() macro, called after acquiring (but before saving) the first point of each scan, now recalculates PL_Y1 taking into account the currently enabled counters.

Buffer Management Fix

An issue, where under certain conditions a "Can't get a big memory buffer" message would be displayed, sometimes followed by a segmentation fault, has been fixed. The issue was associated with eval() calls of certain functions with particular argument types. The error could also occur when a spec server executed commands from a client, as the same internal code is used.

Fix For Tsuji Model UPM4C Configuration

A bug, where spec mistook the configuration of a Tsuji Model UPM4C as a PM4C, has been fixed.

Fix For edconf Anomalies

A few minor display and data entry glitches in the edconf configuration editor have been fixed.

Internal Type of Motor Positions Now 64 Bits

The spec code base has been updated to switch the storage type of motor positions from 32-bit integers to 64-bit integers. Such a change requires an update to the settings file binary format, which has been accomplished in a completely backward compatible manner. Saved position magnitudes greater than 32 bits will be truncated to 32 bits if the settings file is read by an earlier spec release.

Updated settings File Format

For over thirty years, the settings file stored motor positions as 32-bit integers, reflecting the storage type within spec. This spec release introduces an extended format for the settings file to accommodate 64-bit positions while preserving backward compatibility.

The settings files saves motor parameters that are changed during a spec session and is updated whenever any of the parameters are changed, for example, at the end of a move or if the limits or offsets are adjusted.

The long-time settings file data structure saves values for motors in consecutive chunks that are 24 bytes long laid out as follows (where s32_t is a 32-bit signed integer):

struct  sav_mot {
  s32_t   sm_pos;         /* Current position */
  float   sm_off;         /* Current user/dial offset */
  double  sm_low;         /* Software low limit */
  double  sm_high;        /* Software high limit */
};

spec has a compiled-in limit of 320 motors for the settings file. The first 320 times 24 bytes of the new format settings file has the same information and format as before. That occupies exactly 512 bytes less than 8192 bytes. spec now uses that last 512 bytes of the 8K page for a header. Starting on the second 8K page, all four motor values are saved in consecutive 32-byte long data structures formatted as follows:

struct  sav_mot_d {
  s64_t   sm_pos;         /* Current position */
  double  sm_off;         /* Current user/dial offset */
  double  sm_low;         /* Software low limit */
  double  sm_high;        /* Software high limit */
};

Both spec and the edconf configuration editor now write and read motor settings in both locations. When reading a settings file, the code sorts out whether the data was written using the version 1 or version 2 format and uses the appropriate positions. See the spec distribution files settings_file.h for details on the format, including the header definition. See the config/set2asc.c source code for an example of how to test which settings file version was used.

A settings file saved with the new format will not cause issues with older versions of spec or edconf, other than having 64-bit motor positions (if there are any) truncated to 32 bits. An old format settings file will be perfectly understood by new versions of spec and edconf.

New Options To eval()

The eval() function now recognizes optional arguments "quiet", "reset_on_error" (or "reset") and "local_visible" (or "local"). The "quiet" argument suppresses the display of error messages associated with the eval() command on the screen. The "reset_on_error" option causes syntax errors and the like to reset to the command prompt. The "local_visible" argument causes eval() to have the same property as the now deprecated eval2() function, in that local variables defined outside the eval() call are visible to the command being executed within the argument string. Type h eval at the spec prompt for details.

Page Through MCA/Image Optional Parameters With edconf

The edconf hardware configuration editor (usually invoked via the config macro) now allows paging through MCA and image device optional parameter screens (reached via the p command) using the page forward (^F) and page backward (^B) commands. In addition the ^G command jumps to the parameter screen for the first device.

More Consistent Setting Of HDW_ERR With mca_par() and image_par()

Previously, some hardware errors that occurred in the device dependent code reached through the mca_par() and image_par() calls didn't set HDW_ERR. That issue is addressed in this release.

Updates To counter_par() Error Handling

The counter_par() function will now consistently return a -1 value if there is an error in the device dependent code. In addition, HDW_ERR is set for such errors. Note, since -1 may be an allowed value for some parameters, it is more robust to check for errors by looking at the value of HDW_ERR after a call to counter_par().

Select Motor Controller Support Now Uses 64-Bit Resolution

Support for macro hardware motors, spec server motors, and the EPICS motor record has been updated to use the 64-bit resolution for motor positions available in this spec release.

Updates For CLS EPICS Motor Record

In addition to using 64-bit resolution for motor positions, the support for the CLS EPICS motor record contains a fix for a scaling issue. In addition, process variable names generated from motor numbers are now always at least two digits with a leading zero for motor numbers 0 through 9.

Initial Support For SmarAct MCS2 Controllers

This spec release supports the SmarAct MCS2 motor controllers. These controllers use a completely new protocol and syntax compared to the previously supported SmarAct models. The support for these controllers uses the new 64-bit resolution for motor positions. Currently, only the ethernet interface with closed-loop mode is supported. See the mcs2 help file for details.

Fix For EPICS Motor Soft Limits

An issue where the spec soft motor limits didn't properly account for backlash set within the EPICS motor record has been fixed.

Fix For New EPICS Scaler "timestamp" Option

A bug that prevented the counter_par() "timestamp" option introduced in the previous release from working for EPICS scaler counters has been fixed.

Replace eval2() With eval_arg()

All 100+ calls of eval2() in the standard macros have been replaced with eval_arg() calls. The eval_arg() macro is a new standard macro defined as:

def eval_arg(s) '{ return(eval(s, "reset_on_error, local_visible")) }'

The "local_visible" option invokes the functionality of the now deprecated eval2(). The option allows the eval() call to see local variables defined outside the function call. The "reset_on_error" option addresses an issue associated with the relatively recent introduction of eval() in the standard macros. Using eval() allows expressions and variables as macro arguments. Until this release, the eval() function did not reset to command level if there were syntax errors in the arguments (for example, typing ,01 instead of .01). The "reset_on_error" option causes such errors to reset to command level, restoring the traditional behavior.

Fix For Possible Crash With ser_get(), sock_get(), gpib_get() and vxi11_get()

A very old bug that became an issue with unrelated changes made in release 6.06.01, where spec could crash on some platforms when the ser_get(), sock_get(), gpib_get() or vxi11_get() functions were called with an optional argument ("byte", "short", "long_swap", etc.) to read a single binary number, has been fixed.

Fix For HDW_ERR With Successful motor_par()

A bug where the global HDW_ERR symbol was set to "generic error" on successful calls of motor_par() has been fixed. See the HDW_ERR help file for details on the HDW_ERR feature.

Fix For ^C Interrupt While Waiting For Unresponsive DP5/PX5/MCA8000D

The spec support for the Amptek DP5/PX5/MCA8000D accommodates the fifteen second reconnect timeout in the device firmware, but allows the user to ^C out of the wait during hardware configuration. A bug, where a ^C typed during the reconnect timeout on a reconfig call made while spec was running would subsequently disable ^C altogether, has been fixed.

Fix For Process Accounting With splot

A bug, where if the Python splot utility exited for any reason spec did not clean up spec's process accounting table, has been fixed. Previously, one might have seen a "Too many processes for spec" message after that happened sixty or so times.

Fix For Internal Process Creation Error

A bug, where if spec's internal code failed to create a new process (particularly when using the unix() command), pathological behavior occurred, such as run away CPU usage or spec killing all of the user's processes, has been fixed.

Fix For readline Key Binding

An old bug in a key-binding call in spec (but only when linked with the readline command line editing library -- not the default libedit library included with the spec distribution) bound the circumflex key (^) to the reverse incremental search command. That bug is fixed in this release. The behavior can be fixed when running older releases of spec by putting the line:

"^": self-insert

in a file named ~/.spec_keys. See spec's readline help file and the official readline documentation for further details.

Assorted splot Fixes And Enhancements

The Python splot utility included with spec is updated to the current release. See the splot update notes in the distribution for details.

New get_history() Command

A new get_history(num) command returns entries from the command-line history as a string. If num is positive, returns the specified history item. If num is negative, returns the item relative to the current history number. If no item exists at the specified number, returns an empty string. See the history help file for details.

The show_state Utility Now Includes config and settings Info

The spec show_state utility displays the saved state of a spec session in human-readable form. The output will now also display the contents of the hardware config and motor settings files. Type show_state - at the shell prompt to see usage.

New sixc Geometry Configurations Supported

Support has been added to the six-circle geometry code and associated macros to recognize two additional configurations, where the standard gamma, delta and mu angles become pseudomotors. See the updated sixc help file for details.

Linearized Motor Limit Messages Possible

Previously, motor limit messages referred to "clockwise" and "counter-clockwise" hard limits. Now, if the standard optional motor parameter "rotary" is set and has a value of zero, the hard limits will be called "positive" and "negative" in the limit messages. In the hardware configuration editor, the parameter is labeled "Linear/Rotary". This motor parameter is presently only otherwise used in the built-in C code for the MicroMo MVP-2001, Attocube ANC350 and SmarAct MCS motor controllers.

Fix For Assigning From Unset Associative Array

Previously, a runtime error would occur when assigning one associative array to another if no element of the right-hand side associative array had yet been assigned a value. That issue is now fixed.

Application Icons For splot and x11filt Installation Tuned

The installation process for desktop files introduced with spec release 6.07.05 has been refined. The desktop files allow certain modern Linux window managers to find and display icons for the splot and x11filt processes. Previously, the installation attempted to install the files in /usr/share/applications and would display an error message if the installation failed. Now the installation will attempt to install the files in one of these directories: /usr/local/share/applications, /usr/share/applications and ~/.local/share/applications, in that order. For the files to be copied, a directory must exist and the user running the Install script must have permission to create the file. If successful, a message indicating the install location will be displayed. No message will be displayed if the files are not installed due to insufficient permissions.

Support For isel iMC-M/iMC-MP 4-Axis Motor Controllers

This spec release contains preliminary support for the isel iMC-M/iMC-MP 4-Axis Motor Controllers. See the isel help file for details.

Support For Kohzu KOSMOS Series Models ARIES/LYNX

Support for the Kohzu Kosmos series Aries/Lynx controllers are included in this spec release. See the kosmos help file for details.

New counter_par() "timestamp" Parameter For Event-Driven Counters

For counters with values updated by events sent from a spec server or via EPICS scalers or PV counters, the rate at which the values are updated is generally much slower than the rate at which user-level code can retrieve values with the getcounts command. These hardware types have a new read-only counter_par() "timestamp" argument implemented that returns the time at which the value was last updated by an event. The timestamp can be used to check whether an updated value is available. The timestamps are based on the system clock.

Enhanced cscan Macros

The cscan continuous scans macros, introduced in spec 6.02, have two new features. Previously, the cscan macros treated all the enabled counters as cumulative counters, subtracting successive readings to get net counts at each data point. Now, if the optional counter_par() "cscan_instant" parameter exists for a particular counter and is nonzero, each reading for that counter will be used as is.

Count values associated with event-driven counters for EPICS scalers and process variables and spec server hardware are updated at a rate slower than the frequency with which the cscan macro can read the values via the get_counts call. That results in successive readings returning identical values. For these particular controller types (EPICS_SC, EPICS_PV and SPEC_SC), the cscan inner loop will now save a timestamp associated with the value and continue to read values until all the timestamps are updated. That timestamp checking can be disabled for a particular counter if the optional counter_par() "cscan_poll" parameter exists for that counter and has a value of zero.

See the cscan help file details.

Fix For Entering Negative Values In edconf

A bug that was introduced with the edconf updates in spec release 6.06.03 that broke initiating certain number entries with a minus sign has been fixed. In most cases, negative numbers could still be entered prior to this fix by editing an existing entry.

Fix For "short_swap" Option With ser_get(), sock_get(), gpib_get() and vxi11_get()

A very old bug where the "short_swap" option for the ser_get(), sock_get(), gpib_get() and vxi11_get() functions would read but not swap two bytes has been fixed. Note, the older version of the command "int2_swap" did work correctly.

Application Icons Now Work For splot and x11filt

The magic behind icon display with modern Linux window managers has been decoded, and the icons associated with spec's Python splot utility and standard x11filt plotting now display correctly in the window manager task bars. The standard spec installation will now install required desktop files in the /usr/share/applications directory, if such a directory exists.

Unexpected splot Restarts Fixed

Previously, for some commands, the Python splot utility did not return an expected value to spec, which would lead spec to restart the splot program. The issue has been corrected.

Fix For get_angles In Newer Scan Macros

A bug associated with the delta versions of the ascan, mesh and xascan scans defined in newscans.mac (which became the source of the standard scan macros in spec release 6.04.01), along with the delta versions of the cscan, cmesh, vscan, and flyscan macros, defined in cscan.mac, vscan.mac and flyscan.mac, has been fixed. The code that saved the initial positions at the start of the delta scans used the obsolete getangles macro instead of the current get_angles macro. The difference is that the latter includes a call of user_getangles, a hook macro used to set positions when using an old-style implementation of pseudo motors. Pseudo motor implementations that use the macro-hardware feature were not affected by this bug.

The getangles keyword was originally a built-in command in spec. It was replaced with the get_angles macro to accommodate the user_getangles hook 25 years ago. Twenty years ago, getangles itself was replaced by the built-in function read_motors(). For backwards compatibility, getangles still exists as a macro.

Recursive Macro Functions With Different Number Of Arguments Fix

A bug dating from spec release 6.06.11, where a nested call of a macro function using a different number of arguments could result in a segmentation fault, has been fixed.

New Laue Mode For psic Geometry

The psic geometry now supports a new mode that uses the two detector circles and the X-ray wavelength as the three degrees of freedom, keeping the four sample circles frozen. This mode can be useful if the sample rotations are limited or the X-ray focus is smaller than the diffractometer circle of confusion. See the psic help file for details.

Fly Scan Updates

The new fly scan macros contain a number of fixes and additions. Among the fixes, an issue with the value of the prescale counter setting as shown in the fly_setup macro has been addressed. Among the additions, a new loopscan mode is available that doesn't use motors, but simply accumulates counts to the specified number of intervals using the MCS internal timebase to advance the channel counter. See the flyscan help file for details.

Counter Column Width Set Dynamically

The standard scan macros now adjust the width of the columns for counter values as displayed on the terminal window from between 8 and 11 characters, based on the space available. Previously, 8 characters were used. The change affects the standard _head, _loop and _upd_count macros.

Support for Newport DL Controller

This spec release includes support for the Newport DL Controller Series single-axis motion controller. See the DL help file for details.

Update For Multix ME100 Server Hardware Implementation

Several issues with spec's server hardware module for the Multix ME100 have been fixed.

New -A Option For Server White Listing

A new start-up option can be used to limit the hosts allowed to connect to a spec server as clients or to spec via socket ports opened with sock_par("listen"). The -A option is followed by an IP address with an optional bit mask argument, using the standard CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing) notation. Multiple -A options are allowed. For example, the options -A 127.0.0.1 -A 192.168.1.0/24 would allow the localhost (127.0.0.1) and hosts in the 192.168.1.0 through 192.168.1.255 subnetwork to connect. If not given as a start-up option, all hosts are allowed to connect as before.

Expanded Globbing

Commands that support the metacharacters * (which matches any string) and ? (which matches any single character) now also support the [...] metacharacter pattern. Any string that contains the characters within the square brackets is matched. Two characters separated by a hyphen specify a range of characters that will match. An initial ^ negates the enclosed character set. The commands affected are lsdef, prdef, lscmd and syms, along with the optional search-string file positioning argument of dofile() and qdofile().

Omega-For-Theta Four-Circle Kappa Configuration

The geo_fourc.c code now allows the motor traditionally called th (for theta) to be given the mnemonic om (for omega). Previously, using the om mnemonic would activate a special configuration named omega-type, where the tth and om motors are mechanically coupled. Now, if there is an om motor, no th motor, and if the om motor has a non-standard optional parameter named "omega_for_theta" with a positive value, the standard four-circle configuration will be used. This new naming option is available for normal and kappa variations of the four circle. Note, though, the four-circle macros will still also use OMEGA in the traditional sense, that is, the value of om - tth / 2.

New Fly Scans

spec now includes fly scan macros that take advantage of the enhanced hardware support for the Measurement Computing USB-CTR4/8 counter/timer. Fly scans use the counter/timer in multi-channel scaler (MCS) mode with the channel advance controlled by motor pulses from a continuously scanned motor, allowing each MCS counter bin to be associated with an accurate motor position. See the new flyscan help file for details. (The current version is considered a beta release of the macros.)

Updates To Standard Macros To Accommodate Fly Scans

A number of standard macros, including resume, _head, _scan_time and _loop, have been updated to accommodate the new fly scans.

Updates To disable/enable Macros

The disable_save() macro now returns the current state of disabled devices as an associative array. A new disable_restore() can use that array to restore the state. See the disable help file.

Plotting Macros Updated To Take Into Account Disabled Counters

Disabled counters are no longer included in the SCAN_COLS or SCAN_D arrays. The configuration of these arrays is updated at the start of each scan.

Fix For hklmesh Scans

A bug in the _hklmesh macro associated with the new array-based scan engine (see newscans.mac) where the _m[] array used by the _array_scan macro engine wasn't properly initialized has been fixed. (The _m[] array contains the motor numbers of the motors that are part of the current scan.)

Fix For surf abscan and abmesh

The abscan and abmesh macros used in the surf geometries were updated to use the new array-based scan engine that became the default for scan macros in spec release 6.04.01. Several bugs introduced at that time are now fixed. In particular, for several surf variations (namely ames, bl18b, cmc, harv, x19, x22 and x22b), not all motor positions were calculated for each point in the scans. For all surf variations, values written to the data file for HKL with abscan were not associated with the correct scan point. Also, with abmesh, the _m[] array was not properly initialized.

Fixes For Server Hardware

The code for the server hardware feature has improved handling of out of sequence commands and of data transfer to and from the server. See the server_hdw help file for information on the server hardware feature.

Server Protects Against Non-null Terminated Strings From Clients

If a client sends a packet to a spec server where string data doesn't include a terminating null byte, the server will silently correct the incoming data.

Fix For Server Not Running Cleanup Macros On Remote Abort Message

An issue where a spec server sometimes did not run cleanup macros when receiving a remote abort message has been fixed. The abort message is sent by a spec client with the remote_par(host, "abort") command. That command sends a packet containing the SV_ABORT command code. To the server, receiving that command code is intended to be equivalent to typing a ^C at the spec server keyboard. Although previous spec releases would handle halting hardware with the SV_ABORT message, the full reset which includes running cleanup macros (if defined) such as cleanup_once and cleanup_always did not always occur.

Fix For decode() Crashes

A bug in the decode() function, where a string argument with unbalanced quotation marks could result in a program crash, has been fixed.

Fix For Small Memory Leak If eval() Action Doesn't Complete

A small memory leak associated with eval() commands that either exited on an error or were interrupted with ^C has been fixed.

Fixes For array_op() and data_anal() "i_<=_value" and i_>=_value" Commands

Very old bugs dating from the original implementations of the rarely used "i_<=_value" and i_>=_value" commands to both the array_op() and the (deprecated) data_anal() functions have been fixed. The return value for "i_<=_value" was one index too large for values falling between two points. The return value for "i_>=_value" was one index too large for values just equal to that of a data point.

Fix For edconf String Editing

A bug in the string editing features introduced in the edconf hardware configuration editor in spec release 6.06.03 has been fixed. With the bug, the commands ^A and ^E to initiate editing existing string values for non-standard optional parameters or the standard optional generic motor parameters would change the field to a random number.

Fix For Installation Of New Help Files Derived From Macro Source Files

An issue, where the help files created from macro files (currently vscan, cscan, disable and flyscan) were not installed, has been fixed.

MCS Support Added To USB-CTR

spec now supports multi-channel scaling (MCS) functionality with the Measurement Computing USB-CTR4/8 timer/counters. New fly scan macros use the MCS capabilities. See the updated usbctr help file and the flyscan help file for details.

Update To Physik Instrumente E-712 Support

An issue with the support for the Physik Instrumente E-712 piezo controller where positions were limited by an integer overflow to +/- 2174 has been fixed.

Update To Compumotor 6K To Work With Parker Gem6K Models

The existing support for the Compumotor (now Parker Hannifin) 6K motor controller has been updated to work with the Gemini 6K models. In particular, if spec detects a Gem6K model, it will not send the AXSDEF command during the initial presence test, as that command is unsupported on the Gem6K.

Updates To MDrive Support

A couple of issues introduced with the updates to the Schneider Electric (previously IMS) MDrive motor support in spec release 6.04.05 have been fixed. In particular, unexpected messages seen when hitting limits no longer appear, and a bug where the motor_par() "read" and "uread" commands didn't return the appropriate strings has been fixed.

Allow Counter Polling With INTR Software Timer

spec will now continue to poll active counters when using the software timer in INTR (interrupt) mode. This enables the new MAC_CNTR macro-hardware counter type to work when there are no other active polled counter/timer devices. See the mac_hdw help file for details on the MAC_CNTR counter type.

Geometry Macro Install Now Works With Arbitrarily Named spec

The spec install scripts will now ensure that the standard geometry macros are installed when none of the chosen names for the spec executable match a built-in geometry. That allows the arbitrarily named spec instance to be started with the -g flag to force use of the specific geometry.

Fix For Long-Time Client/Server Motor Sync Issue

Since the introduction of spec server motors, the implementation of the position discrepancy messages has been asymmetric. The discrepancy messages occur when a motor controller and spec disagree as to the position of a motor and there are no configuration parameters set to resolve the discrepancy one way or the other. In those cases, spec requires a response before it will continue. When the discrepancy is generated on the server (which is in communication with the real motors), the discrepancy messages appear on the screen of both the server and any clients registered for the motor. If the user responds to the message in a client window, the response is propagated to the server which will no longer need a response. Prior to this spec release, if the user responded to the message on the server window, the client window would still also need a response. With this spec release, a response entered in the server window is propagated to the client, echoed in the client window and the client is released from waiting for a response. In addition, if the user responds on the client window, that response is now echoed in the server window.

Fix For Displaced Controller Unit Number With Macro Motors

A bug introduced in spec release 6.06.11 that caused the unit number argument in calls of the macro hardware motor _cmd() functions for the keys with "_all" in the name to be shifted by one position is fixed in this release.

Update For Compumotor 4000 Serial Support

Issues with the support for the serial interface on the old Compumotor 4000 motor controller have been addressed.

New Variable Argument Feature For Macro Functions

New local variables now exist within macro functions. The variables are named argc and possibly arg1, arg2, etc. The value of the variable argc is the number of arguments used to invoke the macro function. The additional variables arg1, arg2, etc., contain the values of arguments not included in the macro definition, but used in the macro invocation. The argument number corresponds to the position of the argument. If the macro definition defines an argument, there will be no new argument variable created for that position. For example, consider this macro function:

def test(par1, par2) '{ ... }

When called as:

test(1, 2, 3, 4)

the value of argc will be 4, arg3 will be 3 and arg4 will be 4. There will be no arg1 or arg2, since the macro has named parameters in those positions.

With respect to backward compatibility with existing macros that may use these names, a macro argument or local variable named argc will take precedence. However, a global variable named argc will not be visible in macro functions. Also, in the unlikely scenario there are explicitly declared variables named arg1, arg2, etc., and the macro function creates variables for missing arguments, the created variables will mask the existence of the declared variables. For example:

1.SPEC> def test(arg3) '{ print argc, arg3 }'

2.SPEC> test(PI)
1 3.14159

3.SPEC> test(PI, 2, 3)
3  3

In the first instance, no arg3 was created, since the macro was called with only one argument. In the second instance, a new arg3 local variable is created that takes precedence over the declared variable.

Just as with declared macro function arguments, the type of the created variable will be the same type as the variable used in the macro call, whether number, string, associative array or data array.

Server Mode Events Now Sent For "status" Property Registrations

When a client registers for events for a property on a spec server, spec sends an initial event with the current value of the property. However, prior spec releases did not send initial connection events for the status/shell, status/quit, status/simulate, status/ready, and error properties. This spec release remedies that. The value sent for the connection event for the error property is the message "No error". See the server help file for details on server properties.

splot Updates

This spec release includes splot version 3.1.01, which contains various fixes and stability improvements, particularly with respect to making initial connections to spec and for displaying 2D mesh scans. There is also a new feature that allows having the spec command line embedded as a panel in the splot window. The splot update notes are available in the splot/docs directory of the splot distribution.

Fix For ^C During getval() and getsval()

The update in spec release 6.06.04 that enabled command-line editing with the getval() and getsval() data entry functions broke the expected ^C (interrupt signal) and ^\ (quit signal) response on Linux (but not macOS) platforms. That issue is fixed in this release.

Fix For Possible Crash With getval(), getsval() and input()

The update in spec release 6.06.04 that enabled command-line editing with the user input functions included bugs which could sometimes lead to a crash if getval() or getsval() were called with just one argument or if input() was called with no arguments.

Legacy Behavior Restored For Reading mca_par() and image_par() "disable" Status

In adding the support for the mca_spar() and image_par() "unusable" argument in spec release 6.06.01 (which returns zero/nonzero to indicate if the specific device is available), the behavior for the "disable" argument was changed slightly, in that spec would print out an error message if used with an unconfigured device. In consideration of legacy macros at some locations, the previous behavior, where checking the "disable" status of an unconfigured device would silently return zero, has been restored. CSS recommends that new macros that use mca_spar() or image_par() check the "unusable" status for a particular device before issuing additional commands.

Stability Fixes

This spec release fixes an issue with macro functions where the last executed statement in the function assigns a value to a local variable.

Fix For Crash While Waiting For Child Process

A possible segmentation fault when spec looks at child processes that have exited has been fixed. The bug is very old, and the only known manifestation has been when the process created by the EPICS libraries exited after not locating a caRepeater executable file.

New Settle Time Option for Each Row of Mesh Scans

A new _mesh_sleep global variable can be set to the number of seconds to sleep (as a settling time before counting) after moving the motor associated with the outer loop of a mesh scan. The sleep is contained in the standard _loop macro (as is the existing optional per-point sleep, set with the _sleep global variable) for mesh and dmesh scans and for fscan scans when there is #L loop directive in the scan source file. The sleep is implemented directly in the cmesh and cdmesh scans. The standard macros mstartup and setscans (called by startup) now prompt for a value for the new variable. Of course, the variable can also be assigned to directly.

X11 Plot Tweaked

The macros that display the x11filt plots have been tweaked to display the analysis values (PEAK, FWHM, COM) in a more consistent and readable style.

Support For Tsuji Model UPM4C-01 Motor Controller

spec now supports the Tsuji Model UPM4C-01 motor controller. This model is very similar to the UPM2C-01, but has four axes rather than two.

Fix For ^C During input(n) and With Remote Commands

spec release 6.06.01 broke handling of the interrupt (^C) and quit (^\) keyboard signals during the calls of input(n), where n is 0 or less. Also, keyboard signals were blocked on a spec server while executing commands from a remote client. Those issues are resolved in this spec release.

Fix For Excessive CPU Usage With Software Timer

A bug introduced in spec release 6.06.03 that could result in excessive CPU usage during non-updated counting when using the software timer in interrupt (as opposed to polled) mode has been fixed.

Fix For Memory Corruption In Server Hardware Code

A bug introduced in the server hardware facility overhead module, server.c, in spec release 6.06.01 that could cause unexpected program issues has been fixed. The server hardware facility was introduced in spec release 6.04.01. See the server_hdw help file for more information.

Fix For dscan_cleanup

The updated dscan_cleanup macro, introduced with the new array-based scan engine in spec release 6.03.04, had issues parsing arguments when the macro was used with legacy local macros that invoked dscan_cleanup using variables as arguments. That issue is resolved in this spec release.

Updates For SmarAct Motor Controllers

The SmarAct MCS and SCU motor controllers limit the number of steps that can be sent with the open-loop move commands (MST on the MCS and U/D on the SCU). This spec release will automatically split commanded moves that exceed the limit into as many smaller moves as necessary. Also, the hardware configuration now includes options for both serial and socket interfaces. See the smaract help file for details.

HDF5 Support Updated To Current HDF5 Release

The built-in HDF5 support in spec is now using HDF5 stable release 1.10.1. Previously, spec was built against HDF5 release 1.8.14. See the hdf5 help file for details on spec's HDF5 support.

Fix For Using spec Server Counters From Remote Client

spec release 6.06.01 included improved hardware polling, but introduced a bug that prevented clients from receiving an event that indicated the end of counting when using counters on a spec server. This spec release fixes that bug.

Fix For Passing Macro Function Arguments to eval()/eval2()

spec release 6.04.05 added a new capability that allowed the eval() and eval2() functions to accept and return the value of an input string containing a single number, literal string or a variable. Previously, such input would generate a "Not a command or macro" error, just as at the main spec prompt. spec release 6.05.01 removed the "+0" from the eval2(arg "+0") usage in the standard macros which had been there to force evaluation of an expression when arg was a single number, literal string or variable. This spec releases fixes a bug where the code didn't consider the case where the eval()/eval2() argument was itself a macro function argument, which internally is a different kind of object. With that bug and the updates to the standard macros, usage such as def mymove(pos) '{ mv m1 pos }' stopped working, as the standard mv macro expands to something that uses pos as the argument to an eval2() function.

Continuous Scan Timer Preset Now Configurable

The continuous scan macros (cscan, c2scan, cdscan, etc.) program the timer for long count time. Previously, that value was explicitly set to 999 seconds. Some users want to do continuous scans that last longer than that. The scans now use the value of the new global variable CSCAN_TIMER_PRESET to set the timer. The default is still 999 seconds, but users can assign a different value. See the cscan help file for details.

The eval2() Calls Of Macro Arguments Now Protect Double Quotes

spec release 6.05.01 put eval2() calls and double quotes around the value arguments for the standard set, set_dial, set_lm and home macros so that the arguments could be expressions or symbols. In order to allow the arguments themselves to include double quotes, the macros now use escaped single quotes around the arguments. That is, code such as eval2("$1") has been replaced with eval2(\'$1\'). In addition, arguments to aziscan, abscan, abmesh, r2scan, alphascan and betascan, which are associated with particular diffractometer geometries, have had the same update.

Fix For Anorad Presence Test

The code for the presence test for the RS-232C Anorad motor controller used a short 0.5 second timeout while waiting for the reply to the first command. It appears this timeout was too short for some system configurations. The presence test now uses the same two second timeout used by the rest of the Anorad support.

Fix For edconf Crash With 24-Line Window

A crash introduced with the edconf updates for bigger windows in spec release 6.06.03 that occurred when using a 24-line terminal window has been fixed.

New Configurable VME Address Modifier For OMS MAXv

spec now allows the VME address modifier to be configured for the Oregon Micro Systems MAXv motor controller. Previously, the default A16 addressing mode was built into the code. The edconf configuration editor now uses the MODE column to allow choices of A16, A24 or A32 as addressing mode.

Line Editing For input(), yesno(), getval() and getsval()

The spec built-in functions input(), yesno(), getval() and getsval() will now use the command-line editing library to collect user input from the keyboard. All the special key sequences for editing text are available, along with filename completion. The forward and reverse search keys (^S and ^R) can be used to recall command history entered at the main spec prompt, but text entered with these functions is not saved in the history stack. Of course, spec needs to be linked with one of the optional command-line editing libraries (libedit or readline) for the feature to be available. A small change from prior behavior is that with the command-line editing, ^D only terminates entry when it is typed as the first character of an empty line. Otherwise, ^D is interpreted as forward delete. As with the previous implementation, initial white space is removed from the returned value. The new implementation also removes trailing white space.

Fix For Broken vscan Macros

An incomplete edit in the previous release of the vscan macro source file made the variable-spaced scan macros unusable. That issue is fixed. See the vscan help file for a description of the macros.

Support for EPICS release 3.16

This spec release can be linked with EPICS release 3.16 channel access libraries.

Fix For Potential array_op() Crash

A bug that could result in a spec crash when the array_op() commands "fwhm", "cfwhm", "lhmx", "uhmx", "com", "x_at_min" or "y_at_min" were used with an invalid subarray as second argument has been fixed.

^Q/^S Now Available With libedit

The control characters traditionally associated with flow control on old TTY terminals are now enabled for command-line editing when spec is linked with libedit. The default bindings assign ^Q to "ed-quoted_insert" and ^S to "em-inc-search-next". That is, ^Q can be used to insert a literal control character, while ^S searches history in the opposite direction to ^R. As before, alternative key bindings can be assigned in a .spec_keys file in a user's home directory. See the libedit help file for details.

New edconf Features

The edconf hardware configuration editor, usually invoked via the config macro, has several updates.

• It is now possible to edit existing entries. Use the left- and right-arrow keys to change text insertion position, ^A to move to the beginning of the entry, ^E to move to the end, ^U to delete to the beginning, ^K to delete to the end and ^D (or the forward-delete key) to delete one character forward.
• When using ' or " to initiate editing of an entry, if the next character typed is one of the above editing characters, the existing value will not be erased.
• The ^A and ^E commands can be used to initiate editing of existing values starting from the beginning or end of the string, respectively.
• When multiple motor controllers or counter/timers of the same type are configured, the unit numbers associated with the controllers are now displayed on the far right. Typing the unit number of another controller of the same type in the unit field will swap entries.
• The motor and counter/timer screen now displays the row number in the first column, which can be used to swap entries by entering a new row number.
• For lists that page with ^F and ^B commands, a new ^G command will position the cursor on the first item of the list.
• The editor will now display as many motor columns as fit on the screen (up to ten) rather than the four that can fit in 80 columns.
• A new startup option -c cols is available, where cols is a number greater than or equal to 80 and less than or equal to the number of columns on the screen. Only as many motor columns as fit in cols will be displayed. (Each additional motor column uses 13 spaces.)
• The editor will now display as many rows on the Interfaces, Devices, MCA/Image Devices and Scaler screens as will fit.
• A new startup option -l lines is available, where lines is a number greater than or equal to 24 and less than or equal to the number of lines on the screen. A value less than the maximum will limit the amount of information displayed.
• A new -O option (for "old" mode) sets columns and lines to 80 and 25, respectively.
• After changing the window size, the refresh command, ^L, will adjust the display to the new columns and lines values, unless the values were fixed with the -c and/or -l options.
• The q command can be used as an alternative to ^C to quit the program.
• The secondary Scaler screen for miscellaneous parameters, accessed with the s command, has been eliminated. Instead, the parameters misc_par_1, misc_par_2, etc., can be configured on the custom optional parameter screen, accessed with the p command.

New Polled-For-Reading Macro Hardware Counter Type

A new MAC_CNTR macro-hardware counter type is available to accommodate implementations of averaging devices, such as an instrument that takes instantaneous readings from a PIN photodiode with multiple readings averaged to create a counter value. The macro-hardware *_cmd() function is called with the "get_status" key while counting is active, but there is no busy status associated with MAC_CNTR counters. In addition, a new optional counter parameter, "min_read_time" can be used to set the minimum read interval in order to limit how many readings are used in the average. See the mac_hdw help file for details.

Support For OMS PCI MAXk Controller

spec now recognizes and supports the Oregon Micro Systems MAXk family of PCI-bus motor controllers. Each board can support up to ten motors.

Fix For History Display With show_state

A bug introduced in spec release 6.06.01, where the show_state utility didn't display command history, has been fixed.

Consistency For Bit-Shift Operators For Arrays

To be consistent with the implementation of 64-bit integer operations for scaler values introduced in spec release 6.05.03, when bit-shift operators are applied to arrays, each array element is now masked to 52-bits before carrying out the shift operation. (spec stores numbers as double-precision floating-point values, which have a 52-bit significand.) Previously, the bit-shift operators didn't mask the operand, which allowed the highest order bits to be used, but if those high-order bits were set, the values of the low-order bits would be lost. (When an operator is applied to an array or subarray, the operation is carried out on each element of the array. See the arrays help file for more information.)

Obsolete PAGER Built-In Global Variable Removed

The PAGER built-in global variable has not been used since the revised help-file utility was introduced with spec release 6 and is no longer created as a built-in symbol with a value fetched from the environment. The help utility reads a file /usr/local/lib/spec.d/spec.conf that assigns values for shell commands and arguments used for help file formatting and display, and a PAGER variable is assigned there.

Fix For taco_io() Possible Fault

A old bug in the implementation of taco_io() which was activated by internal updates in spec release 6.06.01 and that could result in a program crash has been fixed.

Updated tidy_spec Utility

The tidy_spec utility, which reports on user state file usage and optionally removes user state files, has been tidied up. The utility will now include the separate history file in its report. History files can be removed with the new -h option. In addition, the more conventional -g flag can be used to specify which geometries to clean. The prior flag, -s, is still recognized.

Fix For Time Scan Macros

Some of the "unnecessary" code removed in the time scan macros updates in spec release 6.04.05 broke the time scan plotting when x-axis auto-scaling was disabled. The plotting now works properly for timescan and loopscan, even when x-axis auto-scaling is disabled.

Fix For Crash In getline()

A bug introduced in spec release 6.05.04 where the getline() function could crash has been fixed. The crash occurred if getline() was called to read a line from a file, then called with the "close" argument, then called again to read a line from the same file.

Fix For Crash With Empty Command Files

A bug introduced in release 6.06.01, where spec could crash when reading an empty command file using dofile() or qdofile(), has been fixed.

Better Hardware Polling While Waiting For Keyboard Input

While waiting for keyboard input, spec checks the busy status of active motors, timers, etc. spec also checks for events from a spec server (if using), messages from clients if running as a spec server and EPICS event callbacks (if using EPICS), Previously, spec used a select() system call with a short polling time that only responded to keyboard activity. spec now uses the select() call to also monitor server/client related and EPICS activity. If no other I/O, such as with PC board controllers, serial devices, etc., is active, spec is idle, waiting in the select() call. If there is other I/O, spec polls the devices no faster than ten times per second. The new code should provide faster response times to server/client and EPICS events.

The new code also includes a fix for an issue related to pasting text at the prompt. Previously, there was a noticeable delay between display of each character of the pasted text. That delay is gone.

Finally, the spec_par() "fast_hdw_checks" option is no longer relevant. For backward compatibility, it can still be set, but its value is ignored.

Hardware Polling While Running unix() Commands

spec will now use the keyboard-input hardware polling loop while waiting for a child process created with unix() to finish. The same applies to spec's gethelp() function which also creates child processes to format and display help files. This change means that when in server mode, the spec server will now respond to clients even when, for example, the server itself is being used to display a help file.

spec will give the child process up to one second to complete before starting the hardware polling. That avoids any delays when running quick unix() commands.

A known issue occurs if a client sends a command to a spec server to create an interactive subshell while the server itself is in a subshell. The work around is not to do that. If the situation occurs, upon exiting the subshell on the server, one may need to type ^Z to suspend spec, then fg to bring spec to the foreground.

Parser Now Reentrant

The byacc utility is used to compile the spec parser. CSS has modified the version it uses so that the parser is re-entrant. That means that as of this spec release, multi-line commands being typed at a spec server will not be corrupted by the arrival of commands from a client, as was previously the case. In addition, nested eval() calls should now work flawlessly.

Initialization Implemented For 2D Associative Arrays

Two dimensional associative array initialization is now available. Each element is initialized with three colon-separated items. The first two items are the array indices and the third is the element value. Syntax is as follows:

testarray = [ 1:2:"item", 2:3:"item2" ]

which results in:

testarray["1"]["2"] = "item"
testarray["2"]["3"] = "item2"

Initialization lists can include a mix of 2D, 1D or index-implicit 1D sequences.

Multi-Line Commands Now Saved As One Entry In History List

Commands or statement blocks entered at the main prompt that extend over multiple lines are now saved as just one item in the command line history. This history mode, which is enabled by default, can be disabled by setting the new spec_par() "history_join" option to zero.

Escaped History Character Now Kept In History Item

In order to use the negation operator ! in an expression entered at the keyboard, the character needs to be preceded by backslash, as in \!, as a bare exclamation mark is interpreted as the history recall character by the command line editing library. Previously, when the line containing \! was saved as a history item, the backslash was removed, meaning if the line was recalled, the line would have to be edited to add back in the backslash. This spec release ensures the backslash remains in the history item. However, it is now not allowed to combine \! and exclamation-mark recalled history items on the same line.

History Restored Even If State File Is Unusable

When not starting fresh, but with a state file that is missing, corrupted or otherwise unusable, spec will still try to restore command-line history, which is stored in a separate file since spec release 6.05.01.

Input Line Length Now Unlimited

The length of an input line is now unlimited. Previously, the maximum number of characters was 4,096. This change is important to accommodate the new "history_join" feature which, for example, will save a statement making a macro definition that includes a long string as a single history item.

New "unusable" Argument for mca_spar() and image_par()

A new "unusable" option for mca_spar() and image_par() will return a nonzero value if the associated device is unusable, either because it didn't pass the presence test, because it was marked "OFF" in the config file or because there is no configured device at the given unit number. No error messages will appear if the arguments refer to unconfigured devices.

New Options and Fixes To strdef()

The strdef() functions returns the macro definition of its argument as a string. A problem where escaped string delimiters were not properly coded in the return strings has been fixed. In addition, strdef() now takes an optional associative array argument. If the macro is a macro function, the associative array elements will be assigned the string names of the arguments in order starting at zero. Also, an element of the array indexed by the string "file" will contain the pathname of the file where the macro definition came from or the string "tty" if the macro was defined at the keyboard.

"Server Hardware" Functionality Improved

The new "server hardware" feature introduced in spec release 6.04.01 now supports MCA-type (1D) and image-type (2D) devices. In addition, spec now supports automatic start up of the server process, whether on a local or remote host. spec will also attempt to restart a server that stops responding. The servers can now be daemonized to run in the background unassociated with a terminal. The servers also use lock files to prevent more than one instance from running. See the server_hdw help file for details.

Image Functions Now Set HDW_ERR

The image_get(), image_put() and image_par() functions now set the built-in HDW_ERR global variable with appropriate values on failed calls. See the HDW_ERR help file for details.

splot Updates

The Python splot utility has improvements in functionality, performance and stability. One notable new capability is 2D contour-plotting for mesh scans. Also, print dialogs and functionality are improved.

New Reciprocal Space and Delta vscan Macros

The vscan family of macros do variable step size scans. The scan arguments include a start, focus and end position for each scanned variable, with point spacing being closest together at the specified focus, which can be anywhere within the scan range, including the end points. New vhscan, vkscan, vlscan and vhklscan macros provide for scanning in reciprocal space. Additional v3scan and v4scan macros have been added to support additional motors. Delta versions dvscan through dv4scan are also now included. See the vscan help file for details.

New disable and enable Macros For Setting Hardware

The standard spec macros now include macros to easily disable or enable hardware devices. The macros are based on similar macros from the ESRF and should be fully compatible with those. See the disable help file for details.

Broken Multiple Motor Continuous Scans Are Fixed

A bug in the internal _cscan_prep macro prevented c2scan through c4scan from working correctly, along with the delta versions. That bug is fixed. See the cscan help file for more information about the scans.

Fix For Restoring History When Starting With -u and -t

An issue with the revamped history facility introduced in spec release 6.05.01, where if spec was invoked with the -u and/or -t flags to start with an initial state file from another user or tty, spec would not also import the associated command history, has been fixed.

Fix For Reading Miscellaneous State File Parameters with -u and -t

An old issue, where the spec_par() options and certain persistent hardware parameters saved in the user state file as "miscellaneous parameters" were not obtained from the alternate initial state file specified with the -u and/or -t command line options, has been fixed.

Fix For Slow Pasting With libreadline

spec now includes a work around for a problem with slow pasting of text when spec is linked with libreadline (but not libedit) in certain environments.

Fix For the "move_done" Property On spec Servers For Pseudomotors

A problem where a request to a spec server for a calculational pseudomotor's "move_done" property would return a value of 0, even when the associated real motors were busy, has been fixed.

New motor_par() "dump" option for Newport SMC100 Motor Controller

A new "dump" option to motor_par() for the Newport SMC100CC/PP motor controllers will display all the controller parameter settings as obtained using the controller's ZT command. In addition, the command motor_par(mne, "read", "ZT") will return a multi-line string that contains the complete ZT response. See the SMC100 manual for more information.

New setsector for ESRF SUV Geometry

A new option for the ESRF horizontal z-axis diffractometer to flip the sign of the delta circle is implemented. A new setsector macro in the SUV geometry code toggles the mode.

The newfile Macro Will Add Header If Missing In File

In addition to the warning message that appears when opening a spec data file that doesn't begin with the usual #F, the newfile macro will now append the standard file header to the data file if no line in the file begins with #F.

New _g3 Global To Track Mesh Scan Rows

A new global variable associated with the standard scan macros is set to the first point number for each row of a mesh scan. For non-mesh scans, _g3 remains at zero. This parameter joins _g1, the point counter in the inner loop of scans and _g2, the point counter in the outer loop of mesh scans. The _g3 variable will be used by the Python splot utility when displaying the results of mesh scans as 2D plots.

Added Missing calcHKL In Continuous Scan Macros

A missing call to calcHKL in the _cscan() macro function (used by all the continuous scan macros) has been put into place. Without that call, the SCAN_D array did not contain HKL values when it should have.

Fix For cnt_num() and motor_num()

A bug in the new argument evaluation feature introduced in spec release 6.05.01 for cnt_num() and motor_num() has been fixed. Before the fix, cnt_num() would accept a string containing a valid motor mnemonic and motor_num() would accept a string containing a valid counter mnemonic. Now, those uses return a -1 error.

Fix For GETLINE_EOF

A bug, where the recently introduced global variable GETLINE_EOF was set to -1 when getline() was successfully called with the "open" or "close" arguments, has been fixed.

Fix For TANGO_ERR

An issue where requesting an attribute or property that doesn't exist on a TANGO device didn't follow the documented behavior has been fixed. The behavior is supposed to be that if TANGO_ERR is set to -1 before the tango_get(), tango_put() or tango_io() call, no error message is printed, the calling function returns -1 and TANGO_ERR is set to the text of the message. That wasn't happening for the particular error above, but is fixed in this release. See the tango help file for details on use of TANGO_ERR.

Refinement Of EPICS "slop" Parameter

The special behavior in spec for EPICS motors with the optional read-back "slop" parameter set to a nonzero value has been updated. In spec release 6.03.07, a feature was introduced so that the "slop" parameter for EPICS motors creates a position dead band. Position events within "slop" counts of the current position don't update the current position in spec. However, at the end of a move or during a sync command, the current position will always be read. This update further restricts the position updates to motors started by spec.

Greater Flexibility In Associative Array Initialization

It is now possible to initialize associative arrays without specifying the array index. If the array index is missing, spec will use the position number of the data value in the list as the index number. For example:

testarray = [ 123, 456, "testing" ]

is the same as:

testarray = [ 0:123, 1:456, 2:"testing" ]

Explicit index values can be intermixed with missing values. For example:

testarray = [ 123, "second":456, "testing" ]

will result in:

testarray["0"] = 123
testarray["2"] = "testing"
testarray["second"] = 456

Also, initialization can now be carried out over multiple lines without having to use a backslash escape to continue lines, although the final closing bracket must appear on the same line as the last initialization value.

Array Assignment Implemented For Associative Arrays

It is now possible to assign the same value to every element of an existing associative array. For example:

S = 0

will set all elements of the scaler array S[] to zero.

Improved Sort For Symbols and Associative Array Elements

An improved "natural sort" algorithm is now used for sorting associative array elements displayed with print and for determining the order that array elements are accessed using the for i in arr syntax. The same sort algorithm is applied to the list of symbols displayed with syms, the macros displayed with lsdef and the symbols and values displayed with the utility show_state. "Natural sort" means that consecutive digits are treated as a single character and sorted according to their value as a group. That way, a10 will come after a9, contrary to the order with strict lexicographical sorting.

Consistency For Bit-Shift Operators

The support for (not quite) 64-bit integer operations introduced in spec release 6.00 treated the bit-shift operators somewhat differently than the other bit-wise operations, which masked the operands to 52-bits (the maximum precision available for the significand in double-precision floating-point values, which is how spec stores numbers). Previously, the bit-shift operators didn't mask the operand, which allowed the highest order bits to be used, but if those high-order bits were set, the values of the low-order bits would be lost. For consistency, the bit-shift operators now simply mask the operands to 52-bits and then do the shift operation.

Can Now Use wait() For Externally Started Motors

When spec is sharing motors, either as a client to a spec server or using EPICS channel access, if those motors are started by a different client, setting bit 4 (16) in the argument to the wait() function will cause spec to wait until those motors have completed their move. Waiting can be interrupted with ^C, but that will not stop the motors. See the wait help file for details.

Fix For Escan fixQ Mode

When the Escan macro was rewritten to use the new array-based scan engine in spec release 6.03.08, the fixQ mode was not handled correctly. This spec release includes an updated Escan macro that includes the geometry motors in the motor position array passed to the _array_scan macro scan engine.

Fix For Delta xscan Macros

A bug in the placement of curly brackets that broke the delta scan versions of the xscan macros (xdscan, xd2scan, ...) is fixed. The xscan macros break up a scan into three regions doing denser point spacing in the middle region.

Scans With Count Time of Zero Now Set Count Values to Zero

The standard count and _upd_count macros used to start the counters during scans now set the values of the S[] scaler array to zero if the count time argument is zero.

Fix For Crash On reconfig

Release 6.04.05 contained a fix for a memory leak that occurred during reconfig when using macro hardware pseudomotors. Unfortunately, the fix was buggy, and with some macro hardware pseudomotor configurations, spec crashed on reconfig. This release solves the crashing problem and still fixes the memory leak.

New Argument Parsing For motor_num() and cnt_num()

The motor_num() and cnt_num() functions now evaluate their arguments. If the argument is a number, it is checked if it is in range of allowed motor or counter numbers. If the argument is a simple string, it is checked whether it is a valid mnemonic. If the argument is an uninitialized variable, the functions return -1. If the argument is an initialized variable or an expression, the argument is evaluated. If the result is a number, its value is checked against the valid range. If the result is a string, its value is checked against valid mnemonics. Only commands and functions that make sense in the context are allowed in the expression. Commands that control hardware or generate screen output are not allowed. For example, sprintf() is allowed, but not print or printf(). The functions return -1 if disallowed commands are included.

Built-in Expression Evaluation in spec_menu() Now Safer

Text input to "value" items in the spec_menu() arrays is evaluated using the built-in spec parser. Previously, any allowed spec keywords were accepted. With this spec release, only commands and functions that make sense in the context are allowed. For example, commands that control hardware or generate screen output are not allowed. In addition, most of the error messages that might occur during evaluation of the expression will now appear in the spec_menu() error space rather than at the cursor position.

Revamped History Facility

The command-line history is now saved in a separate file from the state file. It is now possible to start "fresh" while retaining the command line history. (A "fresh" start resets all symbols to their default values, and reinitializes the set of defined macros and global variables from the standard command files in SPECD, /usr/local/lib/spec.d, by default).

When starting "fresh" with the -f or -F flags, an additional -h flag on the command line means retain history.

The new history file is saved alongside the state file in the SPECD directory. If the state file is named, for example, /usr/local/lib/spec.d/fourc/userfiles/user_ttyp#S, the history file will be named /usr/local/lib/spec.d/fourc/userfiles/user_ttyp#H.

Additionally, the maximum size of history can be set using the spec_par() function. The command spec_par("history_size") returns the current maximum number of lines saved to history, which defaults to 1000, the fixed value in previous spec versions. A command such as:

spec_par("history_size", 2000)

sets the history size to the indicated value. For sanity, there is a maximum allowed value (32768).

Although this release of spec and the accompanying show_state utility can read state files from previous spec releases, previous versions will not be able to use state files created from this release. Starting an older spec release with state files from this spec release (or later) will display a message about incompatible state files and force a "fresh" start.

setcap Now Used By Default On Linux

As anticipated in the release notes for spec release 6.04.04, the Linux capabilities facility has now become the default method for giving spec access to PC hardware. The operation on the spec executable takes place during installation when the spec Install script is run by the root user. If the Linux platform lacks the setcap command, spec will use set-user-id root mode, as before. The enhanced capabilities are needed in configurations that use spec's built-in support for certain instrument control and data acquisition devices. For some hardware, spec needs access to /dev/mem to map PCI/PCIe memory space to the spec process. On some recent Linux platforms, PCI/PCIe cards used by spec without kernel drivers are disabled on boot by the Linux kernel, and spec needs escalated privileges to enable the cards. If udev rules are not in place to set permissions for USB devices supported by spec, spec will use escalated permissions to open the device nodes. For some older PC cards, spec needs direct access to I/O ports. To protect the system, spec turns off all capability modes immediately on program start up (just as it does with set-user-id root privilege) and only enables the capabilities around the few lines of code used to gain access to the otherwise unavailable resources.

splot Updates

The Python splot utility is now at version 3.02.

Motor Argument Can Now Be a Symbol or Expression

The motor scan macros, the move macros, the home, set, set_dial, zero and set_lm macros all can now have motors specified as expressions or symbols, as they all use the updated motor_num() function. A number of macros that previously partially accommodated use of symbols or expressions have been simplified, since the capability is now included in the built-in code for motor_num(). In addition, the _check0 macro, which protected against moving motor zero due to mistyping a motor mnemonic (creating an uninitialized symbol with a value of zero), is now obsolete, as the built-in code implements that protection. However, _check0 will still be included in the standard macros to accommodate local macros that still use it.

Motor Macro Value Arguments Can Be a Symbol or Expression

The value arguments for the standard motor macros set, set_dial, set_lm and home (the optional home position) can now be expressions or symbols, as the arguments will be evaluated using eval2().

File Scan Macro Will Now Plot Mesh Scans

A new #L control line in the header of input files for the fscan (file scan) macro can be used to specify the number of outer Loops contained in the following data. The total number of points in the file will be divided by the number of outer loops and spec will reset the real-time plot for each such loop.

Minor Updates to Standard Macros

Several minor updates are included with the standard macros:

• The internal _mot macro has been renamed _show_mot.
• The "+0" strings in all the eval2() occurrences have been eliminated, since eval2() now treats single numbers or symbols as expressions.
• The internal local variables in macros that use eval2() to evaluate macro arguments have been renamed with an initial underscore to avoid conflicts with user symbols (users should avoid using initial underscores for their variables to prevent conflict with spec internal symbols).
• The set_lm macro now includes the values in user units when printing the new limits.
• The macros that use spec_menu() (mstartup, setplot, counters, and setshow) now set the maximum width to 90 characters to improve readability on wide windows.
• The fscan (file scan) macro does a bit better job handling improperly formatted scan files.

Fix For Updated Counting Macro

A missing expression in the updated _upd_count in spec release 6.04.05 resulted in each counting update during the scan to generate a newline on the screen. That issue is fixed.

Fix For Continuous Delta Mesh Macro

A typo that produced the wrong outer loop values for the cdmesh (continuous delta mesh) macro has been corrected.

Fix For lup Macro

An issue where the lup (line-up) macro was not properly supported by the new array-scan engine has been fixed.

Fix For Using Multiple Windows With the splot Utility

An accidental edit to the definition of the macro symbol PL_MULTI_SPLOT in spec release 6.03.09, which broke using multiple windows with the Python splot utility, has been corrected.

Fix For set_sim() No-Sleep Toggle

The command set_sim(0x10) turns on a mode where the user-level sleep() command returns immediately, while set_sim(0) turns that mode off. Previously, if spec was started in simulate mode with the -s flag or was forced into simulate mode due to a hardware lock, set_sim(0x10) could still be used to set no-sleep mode, but set_sim(0) would not turn the mode off. With this release, set_sim(0) will turn off no-sleep mode.

Fix For Defining Macros Using eval()

A bug introduced in the recent 6.04.05 release broke the ability to define macros using eval(). Since the standard scan macros define a _scan_on macro, eval() couldn't be used to do scans. Also, since a spec server invokes the same internal code as eval() to run remote commands, client-initiated scans in a spec server broke. The bug is fixed in this release.

Fix For vxi11_put()

A bug introduced in spec release 6.02.01 that broke sending strings with vxi11_put() has been fixed.

Fix For Terminal Settings On Forced Quit

A bug introduced in spec release 6.02.08, where terminal settings were sometimes not properly reset if spec was quit using SIGQUIT or SIGTERM signals, has been fixed.

Files Opened With -l logfile No Longer Reopened On Restart

Log files opened or created on the command line with the -l logfile option will not be included in the list of files saved to the session's state file. Thus, those files will not be reopened when spec is restarted. This change accommodates sites that use scripts to create uniquely named log files for each spec invocation. Unless such files were specifically closed, they would be automatically reopened in subsequent spec sessions.

array_read() Now Assigns Lines Of Text To String Array Arguments

The array_read() function, which can assign values to data array elements from text files containing rows and/or columns of values, now treats assignments to string arrays differently. When passed a string array argument, array_read() will assign each row of text from the file to successive rows (or columns) of the array. Previously, the text file was scanned for number values, which would be assigned to consecutive bytes in the string array, just as if it were a byte array. See the arrays help file for details.

Updates To eval() and eval2()

A new built-in global variable named EVAL_RESULT will be assigned a value after each call to eval() or eval2(). Its value will be -1 if there is an error parsing the argument. If the last statement of the parsed string is an expression, EVAL_RESULT will be zero. If the last statement of the parsed string is a statement, EVAL_RESULT will be set to 1.

If there is an error parsing the argument string, a new built-in global variable named EVAL_ERR will be set to the error message. Previously, if there was an error message, eval() and eval2() returned the message string, and if there was no associated message, returned false. The functions will now always return false if there is an error.

The eval() and eval2() functions will now accept and return the value of an input string containing a single number, literal string or a variable. Previously, such input would generate a "Not a command or macro" error, as it does at the main spec prompt.

See eval in the functions help file for details.

splot Updates

The Python splot utility is now at version 3. The code has been substantially reorganized. The better supported matplotlib 2D plotting library is now preferred over PyQwt. The new version includes many fixes and improvements. See the updates notes in the splot distribution docs subdirectory for further details.

Updated Counting During Scans Displays Full Row Of Counters

The standard _upd_cnt macro, which displays updated values of the counters during scans if the corresponding option is selected, now displays as many counters as fit in one row on the screen. Previously, only the time, DET and MON channels were displayed.

Changes To Motor/Counter Configuration Saved To Data File

The standard _head macro, used in all the standard spec scans, now includes a call of the new macro chk_datafile_head which does a quick test to see if the motor or counter configuration has changed since the datafile was opened. If there has been a change, the data file is updated with the new motor and counter configuration.

New Option To Save Motor/Counter Configuration In Each Scan Header

The standard _head macro, used in all the standard spec scans, now implements an option to write the complete motor and counter configuration (names and mnemonics) within the header section of each scan. Normally the information is only included in the file header. The new global symbol _sav_mne signals whether or not to save the information. The mstartup macro prompts for the configuration. The default mode is to only write the information in the file header or when there is a change in the hardware config file.

Time Scans Can Now Be Resumed

The _timescan macro, used by timescan and loopscan, has been updated to remove unnecessary code and to maintain sensible values for the _n1 global variable, which generally holds the total number of points in a scan. The changes allow the resume macro to restart a time scan halted with ^C.

MDrive Support Updates

Support for the Schneider Electric Motion (formerly IMS) MDrive motor controller has been updated to work with firmware versions 5 and greater. The newer firmware uses a different command to set the mode of the input switches. In addition, spec doesn't initialize the input switches for firmware version 5 or greater. An initialization sequence for the switches can be included in the hardware config file, though. For firmware version 5 or greater, the initialization sequence can include the commands IS, OS and D#. As before, for earlier firmware the sequences can include S# and D# commands. Also in this spec release, the communication between spec and all versions of the MDrive controller has been made more robust.

Fix For Disappearing OUTFILES When Started With -l logfile

A bug, where the built-in associative array OUTFILES disappeared when the -l logfile start-up option was used has been fixed. The OUTFILES array contains information about all the open output files.

Fix For Truncated Strings With syms -v and show_state

The values for string values displayed with the -v option to the syms command and with the shell utility show_state were previously truncated to approximately 600 characters. This spec release will display the entire string.

Fix For array_read() Crash

A bug, where calling array_read() with certain subarray arguments and with a file having fewer lines than the array could fit would cause a segmentation fault, has been fixed.

Fix For TANGO_ERR Behavior

The built-in TANGO_ERR symbol, used when spec is linked with the TANGO libraries (see spec's tango help file), now behaves as expected when used with syms -v, whatis("TANGO_ERR", "info") and conditionals, such as:

if (TANGO_ERR)
  ...

The above will be false if TANGO_ERR has a number value of zero or is the null string, "". TANGO_ERR has a special property as a spec built in symbol in that it is allowed to be either a number or a string. Other built-in symbols can be only one or the other. Previous spec releases didn't properly accommodate that and the above usages didn't always result in what would be expected.

Fix For Memory Leak When Using Macro Hardware Motors

A bug, where memory allocated for macro-hardware macro-functions calls during the reconfig command was not freed, has been fixed. The memstat command would show the memory allocated for "Parse Tree" growing after every reconfig in previous spec releases.

Fix (Again) For Debug Level 512 Crash

A bug that resulted in spec crashing on start up if the debug level was set to include 512 (memory allocation and freeing) has been fixed. (A similar bug was fixed in release 6.00.05, but subsequent modifications in the code reintroduced the problem.)

Issue With MDrive Limit Messages Fixed

The MDrive motor controller firmware has changed many times over the years and not always in a backward compatible manner. The spec MDrive support parses the firmware string returned by the motor controller to determine what commands will work correctly with the firmware in use. At some point, the format of the firmware string itself changed, which broke spec's parsing of the firmware version. The most noticeable result to users was that spec no longer displayed messages when the associated motor hit a limit switch. This spec release fixes the parsing of the firmware version string and restores the display of limit messages.

Fix For Disabled PCI/PCIe Boards

An issue where PCI/PCIe cards supported by spec at user level would be disabled at the Linux kernel level at boot time has been addressed. The disabled cards would be unusable by spec. The spec code now sends commands to enable such cards during initial hardware configuration (provided spec has suitable permissions).

Updates To Support For Using Linux setcap

The feature for using the Linux setcap utility as an alternative to spec being a set-user-id-root executable that was introduced in spec release 6.04.01 has been updated. The initial support only dealt with the "raw io" capability, which grants access to I/O ports. In order for spec to access /dev/mem, which is needed for mapping PCI/PCIe memory space to the spec process, the "dac override" capability is required. ("Dac override" overrides discretionary access control, that is, bypasses file access permissions.) Also, in order for spec to enable PCI/PCIe cards that were disabled on boot by the Linux kernel, spec requires "sys admin" capability. To protect the system from spec users with such enhanced capabilities, spec turns off all capability modes immediately on program start up (just as it does with set-user-id root privilege) and only enables the capabilities around the few lines of code used to gain access to the otherwise unavailable resources.

This current release still installs spec using the traditional method of changing ownership of the spec executables to root and the mode to u+s. A forthcoming spec release will instead execute the following command:

setcap "cap_dac_override=ep cap_sys_rawio=ep cap_sys_admin=ep" spec

The command can be used on this and subsequent spec releases as an alternative to the set-user-id-root mode. Do not use the command on older spec releases, as the older releases do not disable the privileged capabilities within the code.

array_read() Now Does Tilde Expansion

The array_read() function, which takes a file name as its first argument, will now do tilde expansion of the argument. Tilde expansion means that the tilde character ~ will be replaced with the path of the user's home directory. The array_read() function is used in the new fscan "file scan" macro.

fmt_read() and fmt_write() Now Do Tilde Expansion

The fmt_read() and fmt_write() functions, which take a file name as first argument, will now do tilde expansion of the argument. Tilde expansion means that the tilde character ~ will be replaced with the path of the user's home directory.

whatis() Now Recognizes Number Constants

The built-in whatis() function will now return the value 8 if the string argument represents a numerical constant in any format (decimal, octal, hexadecimal, exponential).

Scan Heading Reverted To Show ascan For dscan

In the initial release of the new array-based scans (see newscans.mac), for delta scans the macros displayed the names dscan, d2scan, etc., in the headers saved to the data file and shown on the screen. In this release, ascan, a2scan, etc., are displayed for the delta scans, which is the traditional behavior.

Updated scan_data_init() Works Better With splot

The macro code for scan_data_init() has a few small changes to work better with spec's Python splot utility.

Fixed Scan Heading For Multi-Motor Delta Scans

A bug in the new scan macros that showed the wrong start and end motor positions for delta scans of more than one motor (th2th, d2scan, d3scan, d4scan, d5scan, dmesh) has been fixed. Only the text of the scan header was incorrect -- the scans were done as commanded.

Fixed Issues With plotselect Assigning DET and MON

Two issues in the plotselect macro related to assigning values to DET and MON have been fixed. If either DET or MON were set to values that did not correspond to an enabled counter when entering the macro, changes made in the macro wouldn't stick. Also, new values might not have stuck if the multiple plot window feature was active.

Fix For whatis("")

A bug where the whatis() function identified an empty string as a macro has been fixed.

Fix For spec_menu() With Empty "list"

A bug, where spec could crash if the spec_menu() array argument specified a "list" menu item with the list itself an empty string, has been fixed. See the spec spec_menu help file for a description of the spec_menu() function.

Smaract Sensor List Updated

The built-in table of supported sensor types for the Smaract SCU and MCS motor controllers has been updated to match the additional sensor types now available from Smaract. See the spec smaract help file for details.

Fix For tango_io() "source" Command

The "source" command option for the tango_io() function, although documented in the spec tango help file, was not fully implemented until this spec release. The "source" command can now be used to set or get the TANGO option that specifies whether to obtain data directly from a device or from a polling cache.

Support For CLS EPICS Motor Record

The alternative EPICS motor record developed and used at the Canadian Light Source (CLS) is now supported. See the notes in spec's epics help file for details.

The for (var in assoc_array) Syntax Now Sorts Elements

The syntax:

for (var in assoc_array) {
     ...
}

will now return the elements in lexicographical order. Previously, the order was unspecified. The sort order is the same as used by the print and syms +v commands when displaying associative arrays.

Custom Optional Parameters Now Available With image_par() and mca_par()

Previously, custom optional parameters added to the config file for MCA- and image-type devices have only been accessible from within macro hardware functions as elements of the associative array prefix_CONPAR[] where the array elements are indexed by the parameter name and prefix is the macro function prefix. With this spec release, the parameters are generally available using image_par() and mca_par().

Integration With Linux "capabilities"

The default spec installation on Linux makes the spec executable a set-user-id root process in order for spec to have access to I/O device resources for hardware control. In this release, the Linux command setcap can be used as:

sudo setcap cap_sys_rawio=ep /usr/local/bin/spec

That command gives spec the I/O privileges necessary without having to make spec a set-user-id root program. See the Linux man pages capabilities(7) and setcap(8) for more information.

(Note, even when spec is set-user-id root, spec runs with an effective ID of the actual user except around the limited calls to gain access to I/O resources. It isn't possible for a spec user to do anything else that requires root access.)

New Array Scan Engine Now the Default In the Standard Macros

The updated scan macros, included in spec release 6.03.04 distribution in the file macros/newscans.mac, are now the default scan macros. The "newscan" macros are a significant update to the long-time standard spec motor scans. Whereas the traditional scan macros calculate new motor positions at each point as the scan progresses, the new scans take an array containing motor positions (and possibly count times) precalculated for each point of the scan.

The new macro source file replaces macros/scans.mac, which is still included in the distribution but is not installed. The array scan engine enables new scan types and creates a more consistent scan behavior, but remains backward compatible with the existing user definable hooks.

The _ascan macro, previously used by the motor scans, is not used with the new scan engine, but remains as an installed macro for the benefit of locally defined scan macros that rely on it.

Redefined scans include ascan through a5scan, dscan through d5scan, lup, th2th, mesh, hscan, kscan, lscan, hklscan, hklmesh, hkcircle, hlcircle, klcircle, hkradial, hlradial and klradial.

New scans that use the new array scan engine are:

fscan

Does motor scans based on positions in a file. The beginning of the file needs a line starting with #M that contains a space-separated list of motor mnemonics. The following lines contain space-separated motor positions corresponding to the mnemonics. Each line of the file corresponds to a point in the scan. The data file can optionally contain a per-point count time as the last item on each line.

dmesh

A delta mesh scan, similar to a delta motor scan. Endpoints are specified relative to the starting positions and motors are returned to the starting positions as the end of the scan.

hklscanarr

An HKL scan that takes a 2D array of HKL positions and an optional count time as arguments. Each row of the array corresponds to a data point. If no count time argument is specified as an argument to the macro, the last column of the array contains the count time for each point.

vscan and v2scan

Variable step-sized scans with densest points at a specified "center" position. The spacing density is calculated using parameters for an exponent and a minimum step size. The parameters will use default values or can be specified either as optional arguments to the scan or in global variables. See a complete description in the comments of the vscan.mac file.

xascan through xa4scan and xdscan through x4dscan

Expanded motor scans that have a configurable number of points at the beginning and end of regular motor scans at a lower point density. These scans are similar to local scans at ESRF.

rscan

A region scan named that allows specifying a single motor scan with various point densities in consecutive segments. This scan is similar to a local scan at ESRF.

Geometry-Specific Scans Updated To Use Array Scan Engine

Scan macros associated with specific geometries, namely aziscan in fourc, fivec and sixc; alphascan and betascan in zaxis; and abscan, abmesh and r2scan in surf, have been rewritten to use the new array scan engine. The macros in newscans.mac include a few small revisions to accommodate the new scan types. Also, the twoc geometry no longer includes separate scan macros, as the macros in newscans.mac will work with the two-circle planar geometry.

Fixes For ^C Response On Server During Execution Of remote_* Commands

A fix in spec release 6.03.05 to eliminate the double echoing of text typed at the keyboard to a spec server while the server was executing a command from a spec client inadvertently disabled recognition of a ^C typed at the server keyboard during execution of the command. This spec release restores that functionality. Note, the problem appeared to exist only on Linux platforms when spec was linked with the default libedit libraries. There were no issues if using libreadline on Linux or either libedit or libreadline on Mac OS X.

Fixes For Printing Long Strings

Issues related to printing long strings (greater than 9000 bytes) when debugging was enabled that could lead to program crashes have been addressed. In addition, debugging messages printed from multiple threads when running in server mode should now be more robust.

Macro Hardware Polling Now Only For Active MCA and Image Devices

Previously, the "get_status" key for the _cmd() functions for macro hardware MCA and image devices would be called for all MCA instances even if only one was active and for all image instances if only one was active. This spec release will make "get_status" calls only for active devices.

Preliminary Implementation Of "Server Hardware" Feature

Although the spec binary generally includes built-in support for hardware controllers, to accommodate devices that require vendor libraries that don't integrate well into the spec binary, a new generic "server hardware" interface is part of this spec release. Currently only MCA-type devices are supported. See the server_hdw help file for details.

Encoder Mode Update For Trinamic TMCL Motor Controllers

By default, the spec support for the Trinamic TMCL motor controllers uses relative move commands for encoder motors (TMCL_E) and absolute move commands otherwise (TMCL). A new custom optional motor parameter encoder_move_mode can be assigned values "absolute" or "relative" to set what kind of moves to use for encoders. Use the p command from the standard Motor screen to access the custom parameter screen.

Encoder Mode Update For Phytron PhyMotion Motor Controllers

The Phytron PhyMotion motor controller support will now use relative moves for a motor configured to use an encoder (motor type PHYMO_E). Otherwise, spec will use absolute moves. In addition, a custom optional motor parameter encoder_move_mode can be assigned values "absolute" or "relative" to set what kind of moves to use for encoders. Use the p command from the standard Motor screen to access the custom parameter screen. Finally, spec will use parameter 22 as the position when configured with an encoder. Previously, spec used parameter 19.

Revised and Updated Support For Princeton Applied Research Model 283

The existing code to support the Princeton Applied Research Model 283 Potentiostat/Galvanostat as an MCA-type device has been substantially rewritten to use current spec conventions and to fix issues in the code. The support now works with data arrays. The native data type is float with 98304 channels. Data can be read in three modes, selected using a subaddress in the selection argument to mca_sget(). No subaddress or a subaddress of 0 interprets data as 16-bit signed integers. A subaddress of 1 interprets data as 12-bit signed integers and is appropriate for reading measured currents with auto-ranging mode off. A subaddress of 2 interprets data as 12-bit signed integers with a 4-bit signed exponent and is used for reading measured currents with auto-ranging mode on. Use the roi_beg and roi_end arguments to mca_get() and mca_put() to transfer data from or to specific "curves" in the 283.

The mca_par() command pass-through options "read" and "send" can be used to program the device parameters and operating mode. The mca_par() "status" command returns the GPIB status byte, which is the same value as returned by the "ST" command. User code should make sure the status indicates the device is finished with an acquisition before the user code reads the data.

Updates For spec_menu()

A new "choices" key to spec_menu() can be used to replace the default YES and NO prompts used with the "bit" and "toggle" keys. See the spec_menu help file for details.

Fix For wm Macro

A bug in the wm (where motor) macro versions since release 6 of spec caused by a typo has been fixed. Previously, if the number of motor arguments was sufficient to require a second row of motors, the user positions in the second and subsequent lines would belong to the first line.

Clarity For When ASCII Plots Get Drawn

A little used but still supported plotting feature that dates from spec's origins is the ability to use ASCII characters and cursor positioning commands to plot scan data on a terminal screen. The option to use ASCII plots is included in the setplot macro and allowed if the standard x11filt plotting is disabled. Although the standard plotting macros would create the correct plot based on the selected options, the functions array_plot() (and data_plot()) would send cursor positioning commands if x11filt plotting was disabled, even when ASCII plotting was also disabled. This spec releases fixes the C code to prevent such output. The macros have been updated to use the plot_cntl() "ascii" and "-ascii" options to ensure the mode is only enabled when specifically configured.

Software Timer Now Plays Nice With Multiple-Timer Configurations

Previously, the software timer would reset to command level if attempting to count to a monitor preset with mcount(). That may have been sensible when spec only allowed a single master timer. However, spec has allowed multiple master timers since release 5.09.01-1. Now, if counting to monitor, the software timer will simply keep track of elapsed time until halted by another master timer.

Fixes For Multiple Master Timer Configurations

An issue when using multiple master timers, where several models of timers would modify the global count time parameter which was then used by the other timers, has been fixed. The changed value could be passed to macro-hardware timers with the "start_all" and "start_one" keys. The master timers that would change the count time values were the Am9513-based models with count times less than 20 microseconds or greater than 71.5 minutes, the Mizar MZ 8310 with count times greater than 10.92 minutes and the National Instruments 660x or 63xx models if counting to monitor with the hardware prescaling option turned on. In addition, the software timer, the Am9513-based models, the Mizar MZ 8310 and the Siemens D5000 models would change the count time with the move_cnt command. Note, though, in move_cnt mode the count time is otherwise zero and in any case should be ignored.

Fix For motor_par() "read" For PI E-712

A bug that always resulted in an error return for the command pass-through "read" motor_par() option for the Physik Instrumente Model E-712 piezo controller and that has been present in the code since the first version of the support in spec release 5.09.02-1 (2011) has been fixed.

Ketek DDP2 Renamed DPP1

The spec support for the Ketek DPP now refers to the device as a DPP1, which matches Ketek's current nomenclature. See the ketek help file.

Improved Locking For State File and settings File

The code to lock and check for locks on the state file and the settings file has been updated to use system calls that should be more robust if the files are on NFS mounts. The state file lock prevents a user from starting multiple instances of the same spec version. The settings file lock prevents more than one instance of spec from trying to control the same hardware. It is also now possible to use reconfig to gain access to previously locked out hardware without exiting spec if the instance of spec that had locked the hardware exits. See the set_sim help file for details.

Fix For Moving Off Limits

For many motor controllers, if a move off of an active limit was not far enough to clear the limit switch, spec would behave as if such a move ended by hitting the still active limit switch. That means spec would print a limit-hit message and abort any other motors that might be moving. With this release, such a move will be treated as a normal move for all motor controllers.

New spec_par() Option To Enable Previous Limit Behavior

The above change in spec code for recognizing a limit condition could be an issue if the spec support for a particular motor controller misidentified the plus and minus limits. If a site finds a problem, a new spec_par("legacy_limit_check") option is available to restore the prior behavior until CSS can fix the motor controller support. See the spec_par help file for details.

Maximum Number Of Scalers Increased To 256

To meet the needs of a least one installation's hardware configuration, the maximum number of scalers allowed by spec has been increased from 128 to 256.

splot Updates

Among the updates for the Python splot utility are a fix for an issue where the first scan might contain spurious points when connecting to spec in server mode. Also, scroll bars are now available with the zoom feature when using the matplotlib 2D plotting library option.

Support For EPICS Motor Record DISP Process Variable

The spec support for the standard EPICS motor record (as used at the APS) now includes the generic DISP (disable) process variable. spec will register to receive DISP events for all motor channels. When a DISP event is received, the associated motor will be disabled or enabled as appropriate. The behavior in spec is the same as if the motor_par() "disable" command had been issued for the motor. However, motor_par() cannot be used to undo the results of the DISP event.

Fix For Huber SMC 9300 Limit Sense

A long standing error in the support for the Huber SMC 9300 motor controller that switched the sense of plus and minus limit status indications has been corrected. Unless user macros relied on differences in return value of the motor_par() "high_lim_hit" and "low_lim_hit" options, there should be no difference in behavior, other than in the messages that describe which limit has been hit.

Fix For Amptek DP5/PX5 Support

Recent updates to the spec support for the Amptek DP5/PX5 latest firmware broke sending the TPFA (fast channel peaking time) parameter for firmware prior to 6.7.5. This release fixes that issue. In addition, the code to display parameters from the diagnostic packet has been revised, which may result in more sensible values displayed on the screen with the mca_par("diagnostics") command.

Preliminary Support For Encoders With TMCL Controllers

This spec release includes preliminary support for encoders on the Trinamic TMCL motor controllers. If the controller type is selected as TMCL_E, spec will use relative moves for positioning, read the position from axis register 209 and write the position to register 209 with the chg_dial() function. In addition, if the optional motor parameter "encoder_step_size" is set, spec will scale the values accordingly. See the tmcl help file for details.

Support For Deceleration Parameter On Compumotor 4000

The spec support for the Compumotor 4000 motor controller will now program the deceleration parameter, if it has been set in the hardware configuration file or via motor_par(). If not set, the deceleration will be programmed with the same value as the acceleration parameter.

New plot_cntl() Commands

The plot_cntl() function, used with the x11filt, now recognizes commands "grid" and "-grid" to enable or disable display of a grid over the plot, "dotsize=value" to set the size of large dots and "width=value" to set the width of the lines connecting the data points. See the plot_cntl help file for details.

splot Utility Updated To Version 2

spec now includes a new release of the Python splot plotting utility. Version 2 of splot can now use either the PyQt5 or PySide Qt binding libraries, in addition to the PyQt4 supported by splot version 1. Also, splot version 2 can use the matplotlib 2D plotting library instead of the PyQwt5 library required by version 1. Finally, a number of issues have been fixed and new features added. See the update notes in the splot distribution directory for details.

Fix For prefix_ADDR For Macro Hardware Image Devices

A bug where the edconf configuration editor didn't read an optional ADDR value from the config file when associated with with a macro hardware image device has been fixed. The value in that field can be accessed in the macro hardware macro functions as a local variable named prefix_ADDR where prefix is the identifier configured for the particular macro hardware device.

Logarithmic x-Axis Now Supported In the Plotting Macros

The setplot and draw_plot() macros have been updated to allow using a logarithmic x axis.

draw_plot() Updated For New plot_cntl() Options

The draw_plot() macro, which does the main work of creating plots, now implements grid mode, dot size and line width for x11filt plots.

New vscan Global Parameters To Set Default Values

The new variable step size macros, vscan and v2scan, now recognize global variables named VSCAN_EXPON and VSCAN_MINSTEP which, if nonzero, will provide default values to use for the exponent and minimum step size if the value are not specified as a macro arguments. See the comments in vscan.mac source file for details on the macros. The vscan macros require the new array-based scan engine from newscans.mac.

fscan Bug When Scanning Single Motor Fixed

A bug in the initial release of the fscan macro, which prevented the macro from working if the scan was for just one motor, has been fixed. The fscan macro requires the new array-based scan engine from newscans.mac.

Macro cplot_plot Updated To Work With Current Plotting Macros

Obsolete code from the cplot_plot macro that attempted to make the macro work with the very old plotting macros has been removed.

sevc Geometry _assign Macro Fixed

The _assign macro, which is defined for each geometry to assign the special geometry motors to the first positions in the mA[] array, was missing a required call to _assign_mA, which is a macro that assigns the rest of the motors to mA[]. This spec release fixes the macro definition.

Kohzu Motor Controller Support Updated To Recognize New Models

The code to support the Kohzu model SC-200, SC-400 and SC-800 motor controllers has been updated to also recognize the newer model SC-210 and SC-410 controllers. The programming sent by spec to the controllers is unchanged.

Fix For Memory Leak In Macro Functions

A memory leak in macro functions has been fixed. The leak occurred when the macro function was defined with arguments, an associative array was assigned to an argument within the function and the function was invoked without an argument. For example, the following minimal code would leak memory:

global ARR[]; ARR[0] = 0; def test(arr) '{ arr[0] = ARR[0] }'; test()

The bug has existed since macros functions were introduced.

Improvements For MCA Sub-Address Syntax

When a single MCA unit has multiple MCA modules (such as the Dectris Mythen 6K/24K or the Canberra Multiport II), the mca_spar(), mca_sget() and mca_sput() functions accept an address argument with a subaddress in the form a.b, "a.b" or "a:b", where a is the MCA unit number and b is the module subaddress. The first form is a number, while the second two forms are strings. Previously, the subaddress of the number form for 1.10 and 1.20 would be interpreted as 1 or 2, respectively. With this spec release, the subaddress will be interpreted as 10 or 20 as intended.

Fixes and Updates For the splot Utility

The Python-based splot utility has several fixes relating to how the axes are drawn and will also now work correctly with energy scans and the reciprocal space parametric scans (hkcircle, hkradial, etc.).

Continuous Scan Updates

The recently introduced continuous scan macros have been reorganized a bit and new continuous delta scans, cdscan, cd2scan, cd3scan and cd4scan, have been introduced, along with a new continuous delta mesh scan, cdmesh. The delta versions of the continuous scans take position arguments relative to the current positions of the motors and return the motors to their starting positions at the end of the scan or if the scan is interrupted. See the comments in the cscan.mac file included in the spec distribution for usage details.

Fix For Escan Compatibility With splot

The Escan macro has been updated to set global variables (_nm, _s[] and _f[]) used by macros that communicate with the Python-based splot utility.

Fixes For scan_data_init(), scan_data() and scan_meta_update()

The scan_data() macro and the new scan_data_init() and scan_meta_update() macros that that communicate with the Python-based splot utility have been fixed so energy scans and parametric scans, such as the radial and circular reciprocal space scans, will plot correctly. Previously, assignments to the SCAN_COLS and SCAN_D arrays were not quite right for those scans.

More Fixes and Updates For newscans.mac

The macros in newscans.mac that will replace the current scans in scans.mac in a forthcoming spec release have been slightly reorganized. Also, a new scan-type macro named hklscanarr takes an array of HKL positions and an optional count time as arguments. If the count time is missing, the last column of the array contains the count time. See the comments in the newscans.mac file included in the spec distribution for usage details.

New Variable Step-Size Scans

New scans called vscan and v2scan do variable step-sized scans with densest points at a specified "center" position. The scans use the new array-based scan engine contained in newscans.mac. See the comments in the vscan.mac source file.

Support For Struck SIS3153 USB VME controller

spec now works with the Struck SIS3153 model VME controller over the USB interface. Configuration is the same as for the earlier SIS3150 model. spec will detect which is connected and behave accordingly. Support for the ethernet interface on the module will be included in a future spec release.

Fix To Accommodate OMS MAXnet Firmware Update

The latest firmware (version 1.48) for the Oregon Micro System MAXnet motor controller introduced a change in protocol which broke spec's existing support. This spec release will work with both the new firmware and previous versions.

Fix For Mythen Firmware 3 Multiple-Module Communication

Issues with updating parameters on Mythen 6K and 24K devices with multiple MCA modules using version 3 and later firmware have been fixed.

New "open?" Option For plot_cntl()

A new "open?" query option for the plot_cntl() function returns nonzero if the currently selected filter process is running and zero otherwise. See the plot_cntl help file.

New "depends" Option For motor_par()

A new "depends" option for motor_par() returns an associative array containing a list of motor mnemonics that correspond either to the real motors that the pseudo motor argument depends on, or the pseudo motors that depend on the real-motor argument. If there is no dependency, an empty associative array is returned.

Faster Quitting When Multiple Plot Windows Are Open

A delay of 0.25 seconds associated with terminating each plot window when spec exits has been eliminated.

Fix For "prestart_all" and "start_all" Macro-Hardware Motors

Previously, when moving macro-hardware motors from different macro sets at the same time, the macro-hardware motor support would call all macro-hardware motor _cmd() functions with the "prestart_all" and "start_all" command keys when starting backlash moves for any of the motors being moved. The code will now call the _cmd() function only for the motor that is getting the commands to start backlash.

Updates For HDW_ERR Implementation

HDW_ERR is now a built-in global variable. It no longer has to be created at user level to take effect. HDW_ERR will now be set on failed calls to motor_par() and counter_par() in order to distinguish a failed call from a valid return value of zero or -1. See the HDW_ERR help file for details and a list of the possible error codes.

Updates For psic Sectors Implementation

The sectors implementation for the psic geometry has been cleaned up and now works more in line with how it is documented in the psic help file. In addition, the sectors macro now takes an optional argument to select how to display the results. See the psic help file for details.

Updates For fmt_read() and fmt_write()

The API for the user fmt_*.c has a couple of changes. The data set number passed to the read and save functions now begins at one rather than zero. A bug in the ff_get_next_head_item() function that could return a spurious command and ID that has values for both of "0" has been fixed.

Updates To ESRF Format Binary File Writing and Reading

The implementation of the "esrf" format for the fmt_write() and fmt_read() commands has updated to allow setting the ID number in the data block header. In addition, a new "esrf2" format is included which aligns both the header and the data on 1024-byte boundaries. The "esrf" format only aligns the data on 1024-byte boundaries. See the notes in the fmt_esrf.c file included in the spec distribution for complete details.

Fix For Crash When An Output File Disappears and Cannot Be Reopened

Updates in spec release 6.02 to implement the built-in OUTFILES associative array introduced a bug where a crash could occur if an output file disappeared while spec was running and the output file could not be reopened. That could happen, for example, if the path leading to the file no longer existed. That bug is now fixed.

Fix For x11filt Additional Window Parameters In .Xdefaults

A feature documented in the spec x11 help file, where parameters can be set in a user's .Xdefaults file for additional plot windows, such as spec_2.geometry, spec_3.Foreground, etc, has not been working since spec release 5.01.02. This spec release restores that feature. With the new macro support for multiple plot windows, it is important to be able to set the default location and parameters of the additional windows.

Fix For User Process Termination If splot Cannot Be Found

A bug, where spec would issue the kill() system call with the pid argument equal to -1 after approximately 64 failures to execute the program assigned to SPLOT_PROGRAM, has been fixed. The effect of calling kill() with pid set to -1 is to terminate all the user's processes.

Fix For unix() Return Value

A bug introduced in release 6.02.08 where the return value of the unix() built-in function was shifted up eight bits has been fixed. (The return value of unix() is the exit status of the system command executed by unix().)

Fix For HDW_ERR In Server Mode

An old problem, where a socket error in the spec server read or write threads could set the HDW_ERR value associated with a user function call in the command thread, has been fixed. For example, during execution of a command such as gpib_get(), HDW_ERR could be set by the read thread if it loses a client connection even though the GPIB call had no error. In this spec release, socket errors associated with the spec server read or write threads will no longer change the value of HDW_ERR.

New Macro Support For Multiple Plot Windows

The standard macros now support assigning different counters to different plot windows. The feature works with both the traditional x11filt plotting and the new Python-based splot plotting. Use the setplot macro to enable using multiple plot windows. Use the plotselect (or counters) macros to assign particular counters to up to five different plot windows. If both x11filt and splot utility are enabled, the same window assignment of counters is applied to each.

Updates To splot Utility To Reduce Use of splot_cntl()

The standard plotting macros have been updated to reflect the new ability of the Python-based splot utility to adjust plots to user preferences automatically. For plotting during scans, it is no longer necessary to include any splot_cntl() commands in the macros other than an "open" command. The plot configuration is now added to the meta region of the SCAN_D shared array.

Update To setplot Argument Behavior

Without arguments, setplot prompts for plot configuration options, most of which are toggles assigned to bits in the PLOT_MODE global variable. With an argument, PLOT_MODE is set directly. If the argument begins with a + or - sign, previously, the value would be added to or subtracted from PLOT_MODE. With this spec release, bit-wise operations will be used instead to add to PLOT_MODE or remove from PLOT_MODE the bits contained in the argument, so that repeated calls with the same argument will not change bits not in the argument.

Spurious Comments Generated By the set Macro Eliminated

To accommodate using the set macro with pseudo motors, the macro compares positions returned by getangles before and after changing the offset. Changing the offset for a pseudo motor that depends on real motors or for a real motor that is used by pseudo motors, can change the user position of the associated motors. However, motors with fluctuating positions due to sensitive encoders could also show up as having the offset changed. The set macro has been revised to use the new "depends" option for motor_par() and will now only reported changed offsets for the relevant motors.

New Test For Accessible Data File In Standard Scan Header

The standard _head macro used by all the scans will now make sure the current data file (as contained in the DATAFILE symbol) can be accessed using the open() function. If open() fails, the _head macro will execute the exit command which will abort the scan. Previously, repeated messages indicating failure to open the data file would be displayed while the scan continued.

User Hook move_poll Macro Now Included In dscan_cleanup

The move_poll macro, defined as a null macro by default, is now called after the _move command in dscan_cleanup.

Fix For EPICS Motors With Rapidly Updating Encoders

In configurations with EPICS motors that constantly send updates with small fluctuations in position (due to a sensitive encoder, for example), spec could send move commands to the motors during scans, even if the motors were not involved in the scans. The "slop" parameter can now be used with such motors to create a position dead band. Position events within "slop" counts of the current position won't update the current position in spec. However, at the end of a move or during a sync command, the current position will always be read. The "slop" parameter is set on the second standard optional parameter motor screen of the configuration editor.

Additional Fix For Communication Errors With Tsuji PM16C Motor Controllers

An additional issue where a bad read of the Tsuji PM16C motor controller status could cause a spurious "both limits set" event has been corrected.

Can Return Sub-second File Times with file_info()

The "atime", "mtime" and "ctime" options to file_info() will now return file times to sub-second resolution on platforms and file systems that support the feature. Linux platforms with glib version 2.12 or greater support the feature. All Mac OSX versions supported by spec support the feature, although the HFS and HFS+ file systems do not.

Broken or_swap Macro Fixed

Updates to the orientation matrix macros in spec release 6.02.08 to accommodate a new seven-circle geometry introduced a bug in the or_swap macro used to swap the two orientation vectors. That bug is fixed in this release.

Fix For Server Crash

A rare crash that could occur in a spec server when the socket connection to a client was unexpectedly lost while there were pending events for that client has been fixed.

Improved Handling Of Communication Errors With Tsuji PM16C Motor Controllers

The spec support for the Tsuji PM16C motor controllers now includes code to better detect and deal with communication errors. Previously, if the communication interface was error prone, it was possible for the messages between the controller and spec to get out of sync, with responses getting associated with the wrong command. One symptom of the out-of-sync problem would be a spurious message that a motor hit a limit switch. The code now does consistency checking on the responses to the read-position and get-status commands. If the responses are in the wrong format for the particular command, spec will attempt to resynchronize communications.

Fix For Kontron PCIDCC5 Digital I/O

A bug in the code that prevented the counter_par() commands for setting and reading the digital I/O on the Kontron (ICS Advent) PCIDCC5/5-P model Am9513-based PCI counter/timer card has been fixed. See the am9513 help file for details on the commands.

Fix For Agilis Configuration Crash

A recently introduced bug, where the code for the Newport Agilis motor controller could cause a crash if a controller was configured but not present, has been fixed.

Unlimited Line Length for getline() and array_read()

The getline() function to read a line of text from a file and the array_read() function to fill a data array with values from a text file have been updated to allow reading from files with unlimited line lengths. Previously, getline() would read up to a maximum of 4095 characters and array_read() would allow input lines up to 2047 characters.

New GETLINE_EOF Built-in Symbol For getline()

To distinguish between an end of file, an error or a literal -1, the getline() function now assigns a value to a new built-in variable named GETLINE_EOF. After each call of getline(), the value of GETLINE_EOF will be 1 if there was an end-of-file condition on the read of the file, -1 if there was an error reading the file or if the file couldn't be opened and zero if the read was successful. For backward compatibility, the getline() return value will continue to be -1 on end of file or an error, or if the current line of the file is the string -1.

New array_read() Option To Skip Initial Columns

A new optional "C=#" argument to array_read() can be used to specify from which column in the file to start assigning data. See the arrays help file for details.

Restored Capability For Fixed-Ranged Updated Plots

Release 6.02 of spec included new plotting macros that auto-ranged the x axis in the updated plot displayed during scans. This spec release now includes an option to configure the behavior as either fixed or auto-ranged via the setplot macro.

Updates For New Focus 8742 Motor Controller

The spec support for the New Focus 8742 controller now works with its USB and RS-485 (via RS-232C) interfaces. In addition, daisy-chained units connected in series with a master (gateway) controller using the RS-485 connections are now supported. When using daisy-chained units, set the "crate" address in the motor configuration to the module address. Finally, the socket connection code will now automatically attempt to reconnect when connections are dropped by the controller.

Fix For Mythen When Specifying a TrimMo Settings File

An old typo in the spec Dectris Mythen MCA support that translated the deprecated (in firmware version 2) "-trimfile TrimMo" command to the "-settings StdmMo" command has been corrected by removing the surplus lower case m. In addition, the deprecated (in firmware version 3) "-settings" arguments that begin with Hg, Std, and Fast have those prefixes automatically removed when using firmware version 4.

Fix For Reporting Trinamic TMCL Parameter Values

All the Trinamic TMCL motor controller parameters can be accessed via the motor_par() function using generic numbered names, such as "par6". Some of these parameters have aliases such as "PeakCurrent" which corresponds to parameter 6. Previously, if the parameter value was changed using the generic name ("par6"), the value reported by motor_par() for the alias ("PeakCurrent") would not reflect the new value. That issue is corrected in this release.

Fix For Server Mode Interactive Command Echoing

An issue where characters typed at the keyboard of a spec server session could be echoed twice to the screen if typed while the server was executing a client command has been fixed.

Updates For splot Utility

The splot utility now supports x-axis logarithmic plotting. Also, an issue with y-axis logarithmic plotting in shared-data mode, where data was not always plotted, has been fixed. In addition, a new splot_cntl() command "plotrange" provides the same functionality as the plot_range() function for the traditional plotting and is used in the standard plotting macros to implement the setplot options to force the y-axis minimum to zero and to use fixed ranges for the x axis during scans.

A new splot_cntl() command "showstats" can be used to toggle the display of the peak, center-of-mass and full-width-at-half-max markers.

A new splot_cntl() command "showmotor" can be used to toggle the display of a marker showing the current position of the

Fixes and Updates For newscans.mac

The previous release included a file named newscans.mac that contains a new implementation of the standard macros that will replace the standard macros in a forthcoming update. There are a few updates to these new scan macros as follows:

The HEADING string (used in the screen display, data file and plots) for the dscan macros had showed incorrect start and end positions, but is now fixed.

The new fscan (file scan) macro has been updated to allow the count time to be optionally assigned at the end of each row of motor positions. If invoked without a count-time option, and if the file contains a count time at the end of each row of motor positions, the file count times will be used at each point. If the scan is invoked with a count-time argument, the file count times will be ignored. Also, the motor mnemonics for the scan must now be proceeded by a #M and a space rather than a lone # to allow for comments in the file and future # directives. A single # followed by a space introduces a comment.

New String-Handling Functions With Regular Expressions

New built-in string-handling functions use an extended regular expression as an argument as follows:

rsplit()

like split() in that it splits a string and places the parts into an array, but the delimiter can be a regular expression.

match()

finds the position in a string where a regular expression occurs, and optionally places matched subexpressions into an array.

sub()

replaces a single instance of text in a string that matches a regular expression.

gsub()

replaces all instances of text in a string that match a regular expression.

gensub()

replaces selected instances of text that match a regular expression.

See the entries for each function in the funcs help file for further details and features.

New Macro Special Symbol $@

It is often useful when parsing macro arguments, particularly when the macro is called with a variable number of arguments, to use the split() function to place the arguments into an associative array. The normal syntax is:

{
  local ac, av[]
  ac = split("$*", av)
}

However, that usage does not respect quoted arguments, since $* removes quotation marks when concatenating the macro arguments. This spec release introduces a new sequence $@. When an ordinary macro with arguments is expanded, $@ will be replaced with the concatenated arguments delimited by the special character \a (the audible bell, ^G, ASCII 7). The string can then be split as follows:

{
  local ac, av[]
  ac = split("$@", av, "\a")
}

The elements of av[] will respect the quoted arguments in the macro invocation. There is no syntax to escape the \a.

New "lines" Option For file_info()

A new "lines" option for the file_info() function returns the number of newline characters in the specified file. See the file_info() entry in the funcs help file for a description of all the available options.

New Flexibility For the Indirection Operator @

The spec parser now allows the indirection operator @ to be applied to a parenthesized variable or associative array element. The priority of @ is higher than the square brackets of the array, so parenthesis must be used if the array element contains the string which points to the symbol. For example:

SPEC> arr[0] = "PI"; s = "arr"
SPEC> print @s[0], @(arr[0]), @(@s[0])
PI 3.14159 3.14159

The expanded syntax allows cascaded usage as shown above.

strdef() Can Now Return Chained Macro Segments

The strdef() function, which returns the string definition of the macro name given as an argument, can now return segments of a chained macro as specified by the associated key given as a second argument. See the strdef() entry in the funcs help file for a detailed description.

get_lim() Can Now Take Backlash Into Account

The get_lim() function to return software motor limits will return the limit corrected for backlash if the magnitude of the second argument is greater than 1. For example, for a motor with sign of user*dial positive, backlash positive and steps per degree positive, the corresponding return values might be:

SPEC> p get_lim(tth, -1), get_lim(tth, -10)
-180 -179.99

That is, although the actual soft limit is -180, when taking account the configured backlash, the effective limit is -179.99.

Move Macros Now Allow Variables For Motor Mnemonics (Really)

The feature announced with release 6.02 that allowed motor mnemonics to be given as variables for the motor-move macros (mv, umv, mvr, umvr, mvd and umvd) didn't actually work when the release came out. The parser modification for the indirection operator (@) that enabled the feature was problematic and immediately reverted. This spec release fixes the problems and restores the behavior. Thus, usage such as:

for (i = 0; i < 5; i++) mv i 10

and:

{ par="phi"; umv par 4; par=th; umv par 1 }

will work.

New Return Value For srand()

The srand() function, used to set the seed value for the pseudo-random number generator now has a return value, namely the value of the previous seed.

delete Can Now Be Used On Entire Associative Array

The delete built-in command can now be used to delete all elements from an associative array. Previously, delete would only remove one element. Note, delete doesn't remove the array or change its type, it just removes all the elements. Use unglobal to remove the array from the symbol table.

Preliminary Release of Updated Scan Macro Package

A file named newscans.mac is included in the distribution that contains a preliminary release of a new array-based scan engine and several new standard scans. These scans will replace the standard scans in scans.mac in a subsequent release. The new scan engine uses a pre-filled array of motor positions for the scan points, which allows better pre-scan limit checks and enables new scan types. Existing scans that are replaced include ascan through a5scan, dscan through d5scan, lup, th2th, mesh, hscan, kscan, lscan, hklscan, hklmesh, hkcircle, hlcircle, klcircle, hkradial, hlradial and klradial. The standard _ascan macro will no longer be used, but will continue to be included in the distribution for the benefit of local scans that use it.

The macros in newscans.mac are not installed with this release, but can be activated by reading the file with qdofile() or qdo.

New scans in newscans.mac include:

A new fscan does motor scans based on positions in a file. The first line of the file contains a list of motor mnemonics as a comment. Subsequent lines contain corresponding motor positions. Each line is one point in the scan.

A new dmesh scan, which is a delta mesh scan, similar to a delta motor scan. Endpoints are specified relative to the starting positions and motors are returned to the starting positions as the end of the scan.

A series of expanded motor scans named xascan through xa4scan and xdscan through xd4scan add a configurable number of points at the beginning and end of regular motor scans at a lower point density.

A region scan named rscan allows specifying a single motor scan with various point densities in consecutive segments.

See the comments in the newscans.mac file in the spec distribution for additional details.

Fix For split() In Macro Functions

An old bug, where an "Illegal reference to array" error would occur when using a local associative array as a return value in a macro function when the array had been used with the split() function but where elements had not otherwise been assigned any values, has been fixed.

Fix For array_read()

The return value of array_read() is the number of points read from the file. A bug, where the value did not include points assigned when the number of columns in the data file was less than the array dimension, has been fixed. spec has always assigned as many elements to the array as are available in the file, but had not been including points in the return value when a line of data from the file did not have values to fill every column (or row for a column-wise array).

Fix For counters/plotselect Macro

An issue with the interactive spec_menu() versions of the counters/plotselect macro introduced in spec release 6.02, where the wrong value would be assigned to DET or MON if there were any lower-numbered disabled counters, has been fixed.

Fixes and Updates For splot Utility

Arguments in the scan_info_update() macro function in the standard _tail and _scanabort macros along with the splot Python code have been fixed to correct an issue where the last point of scans wasn't always drawn. Another issue with the splot utility, where plots sometimes did not refresh correctly when switching between types of scans, has been fixed. New options for the splot_cntl() "marker" command are available. A new splot option to display the current motor position is available from the PLOT menu of the splot window.

Fixes For Trinamic TMCL Support

An issue with spec's support for the Trinamic TMCL motor controllers, where it was not possible to update certain global parameters, has been fixed.

New Timing Parameters For Agilis Communication

New non-standard optional parameters named "wdelay" and "rdelay" are available for the Agilis motor controller. These parameters can set a delay for writing commands to the Agilis and reading replies from the Agilis. See the agilis help file for details.

Fixes For sevc Geometry

The preliminary support for the sevc seven-circle diffractometer geometry has been updated with several fixes in the sevc.src macros.

Fix For tango_put() With String Array

A segmentation fault that occurred with tango_put() when called with an empty associative array for a data type that required a string array has been fixed.

More Fixes For spec_menu() Issues

A bug, where a call to spec_menu() with a menu that had no editable items would cause a segmentation fault, has been fixed.

Correction For Recent whatis() Fix

A fix in release 6.03.01 for an old bug in the whatis() function that inadvertently broke another aspect of the function has been corrected.

Support For Newport Agilis AG-UC8

This spec release includes support for the Newport Agilis AG-UC8 piezo controller. The update to the existing code for the Agilis AG-UC2 model includes support for the absolute positioning command and setting the step-amplitude parameter. See the new agilis help file for details. Note, the update code has only been tested with the serial interface on the AG-UC8. Please contact CSS if any problems using the USB interface on either the AG-UC2 or AG-UC8.

Macro Hardware Support For CCD-type (2D) Devices

The macro hardware facility now includes support for CCD-type (2D) detectors. See the updated mac_hdw help file for details.

Updated Support For Mythen Firmware 3 and Mythen2 Firmware 4 Models

The spec support for the Dectris Mythen MCA has been revised and updated to work with firmware version 3 and the new Mythen2 models that use firmware version 4. See the updated mythen help file for details.

Fix For spec_menu() Issues

The relatively new spec_menu() function has been updated to fix a couple of issues. A crash that could occur when passing an uninitialized symbol as the first argument has been fixed. A crash that could occur when scrolling with a menu that included "desc" keywords for items that had no editable elements has been fixed. In addition, if there is a "desc" keyword with no editable elements, the spec_menu() function will now treat the entry as a "subhead" so that the cursor does not stop on the item.

sync Command Fixed To Halt Multiple Timers

The sync command, normally used to make sure motor hardware and software are synchronized, also aborts the current move and active counting. Previous versions of spec only halted one active timer or acquisition device, even if multiple master timers or acquisition devices were configured. The sync command will now force stop all active timers.

New Indenting Option For config File

The configuration editor edconf now takes optional arguments +w or -w to add or remove a single character white-space indentation in the config file on lines beginning with the words STATE, CONPAR, MOTPAR and CNTPAR. Adding the space aids in readability of the file. The +w adds the indenting when writing out the file. The -w removes the indenting. If the option is unspecified, the existing indenting (or lack thereof) is maintained.

Updates In the HDF5 Support

The standard spec distribution now includes static libhdf5.a and libz.a files that can be linked with spec during installation to provide HDF5 support. The libraries have been built from the open-source HDF5 and ZLIB source packages. The spec Install script now prompts for HDF5 linking specifications.

New options are available to set the raw-data chunk-cache parameters used for writing data to the HDF5 file, either per dataset or for all datasets in an opened file.

A new h5_link() function can be used to create soft links to HDF5 objects in an external file.

A new "flush" option to h5_file() can be used to tell the library to write existing data out to disk.

The format used to save string-valued associative arrays has been changed from using variable-length strings to using fixed-length strings.

One-dimensional arrays can now be set to unlimited size. One scalar value at a time can be added using the frame syntax of h5_data().

spec is now built against release 1.8.14 of the HDF5 libraries.

See the spec hdf5 help file for details on the updates.

Support For ARM Platforms

The spec package can now be built to run on ARM platforms such as the Raspberry PI or BeagleBone Black. Contact CSS for details on OS support.

Fix To Enable Support For Baltic Scientific Instruments Si(Li) Detector

The BSI detector support documented in the spec release 6.02.09 release notes was not actually available due to a coding error. That issue has now been corrected.

Fix For whatis()

A old bug in the built-in whatis() function that could incorrectly identify a local variable as a macro has been fixed. Although unlikely, if a user defined a macro named f, the show_motor_info() macro function used by wa, lm, etc. would fail due to this whatis() bug.

(Please see release 6.02 introduction below.)

Fix For Amptek MCA8000D

An Amptek firmware update (version 6.07.00) broke spec's support for the MCA8000D by changing the command used to set the preset time from PRET to PREL. This spec update recognizes the new firmware and uses the new command.

Fix For tango_io() Crash

A bug that could cause a crash when using tango_io() with a TANGO device that was not in the TANGO database has been fixed.

Support For Baltic Scientific Instruments Si(Li) Detector

This spec release supports the Baltic Scientific Instruments Si(Li) Detector type SER-25 based on the SP350 controller board. The device is configured as an MCA-type instrument and uses a serial interface. See the bsi_sp350 help file for details.

Trinamic TMCL Updates

The recently added Trinamic TMCL motor controller support has been updated so that parameters that can be stored in EEPROM will be saved to EEPROM when set using motor_par() or when configured as nonstandard optional parameters in the config file. In addition, spec can now restore the position registers when a power cycle has been detected. To enable the latter feature, the controller parameter "check_interval" needs to be added to the config file. See the tmcl help file for details on both new features.

Fix For HDF5 Data Frames With 1D Arrays

A bug with the new HDF5 support where the frames option wasn't working for one-dimensional arrays has been fixed.

Update For Escan Macro

The standard Escan macro will now use the global UP variable to set the number of decimal digits displayed on the screen for the monochromator motor positions, just as is done with the standard motor scans. The UP default value is 4.

splot Updates

This spec release includes various improvements to the Python splot utility, including a new splot_cntl() "marker" option to create vertical marker lines on the plot. See the files in the splot distribution docs directory for detailed descriptions, particularly the development log and command server documentation.

Improvement In the ser_par() "queue" Option

Previously, the "queue" option for the ser_par() command would return the number of characters available in spec's read-ahead buffer. That buffer has bytes from a previous ser_get() call that were returned by the system read() call, but beyond the specified byte count or end-of-string match. The "queue" option will now return that same value if it is nonzero. However, if spec's read-ahead buffer is empty, the code will check if any characters are available in the kernel buffer and return that value.

New Serial Debugging Option For Hex Output

For serial device I/O, spec debug level 128 uses octal escape sequences to represent unprintable characters. If debug level 0x400000 is also set, the debugging output will use a hexadecimal format for all bytes, as has been possible for socket debugging since spec release 5.05.05-5.

New Invocation Option For plotselect

When invoked with arguments, the plotselect macro now accepts a comma-separated list of counter numbers or mnemonics to set which counters are to be plotted. This is in addition to the still supported space-separated list of counter numbers or mnemonics invocation. When invoked without arguments, plotselect still runs in interactive menu mode.

More Robust Server-Mode Debugging

An issue in server mode with debug levels 0x1000 and 0x100000 (for debugging server-client communications and thread locks) that could cause crashes has been addressed.

Updates For Trinamic TMCL Motor Controller Support

The preliminary support for the Trinamic TMCL motor controllers now includes new commands to access the I/O ports. See the tmcl help file for more details.

Support For NI GPIB Version 3.2 Libraries

It is now possible to link with version 3.2 of the National Instruments GPIB libraries for Linux. However, CSS still recommends using spec's built-in support. See the nigpib file for more information.

Fix For NI GPIB-ENET/1000 gpib_put()

An old bug where a gpib_put() of more than 500 bytes would fail when using spec's built-in support for the National Instruments GPIB-ENET/1000 has been fixed.

Fix For Mythen 1.3 Firmware

Support for the older Dectris Mythen MCA version 1.3 firmware that was inadvertently broken in spec release 6.00.11 is now fixed.

Fix For Measurement Computing USB-CTR04 Detection

An issue, where spec had the wrong USB device ID coded for the Measurement Computer USB-CTR04 with the result that spec did not detect that device, has been fixed. The device ID for the USB-CTR08 was correct.

Fix For Crash With Incomplete terminfo Description

A bug, where spec could crash with the spec_menu() function if certain function-key sequence descriptions were missing from a terminfo entry, has been fixed.

Preliminary Support For Seven-Circle Geometry sevc

Preliminary support for a new seven-circle diffractometer geometry is included in the source file geo_sevc.c. Choose sevc as the geometry type during spec installation. To accommodate the seven geometry motors, orientation-matrix macros that were based on a maximum of six geometry motors have been updated to work with seven.

Fix For remote_poll()

Updates in spec release 6.02 to allow more flexibility in specifying the name of the spec server inadvertently broke the remote_poll() function. That issue is now fixed.

Fix For GE Fanuc SBS (Bit-3) Driverless Support

Optimizer improvements in gcc release 4.8 broke the spec driverless support for the GE Fanuc (formerly SBS, formerly Bit-3) PCI-to-VME model 61x/62x controller boards (in at least some configurations). This spec release fixes that issue.

Preliminary Support For Saving To HDF5 FILES

This spec release features new functions to save data using the HDF5 standard. See the new hdf5 help file for details. In order to enable the functions, spec must be linked with the HDF5 library, which can currently be configured by setting the site_lib ("extra library flags") installation parameter to include the library, as in site_lib=-lhdf5. This preliminary support expects version 1.8.13 of the library, although will still function if linked with an earlier 1.8 release. Future releases will include a compatible library version. The function syntax and usage in this preliminary release is subject to change. Please contact CSS directly for additional information.

Fix For Struck SIS1100

Optimizer improvements in gcc release 4.8 broke the spec driverless support for the Struck SIS1100 PCI and PCIe VME controller boards (in at least some configurations). This spec release fixes that issue.

Updates and Fixes For Phytron phyMOTION

The recently introduced Phytron phyMOTION support has been updated to fix issues associated with identifying the crate configuration and with addressing I/O modules. In addition, the USB interface (which appears as a serial device to spec) is now supported. Also, spec's udev rules file for Linux platforms now includes a rule to create a /dev/phymotion special device when the controller is connected.

Support For Micos Venus-1

This spec release includes support for the old Micos Venus-1 programming syntax, such as used on the Corvus Eco model motor controller. The configuration is the same as for the Venus-2 and Venus-3 controllers. The spec code automatically selects the appropriate syntax version to use.

Added "init_sequence" Parameter For MDrive Motors

The MDrive motor controller support now recognizes a parameter named "init_sequence". The parameter must be set in the config file (type p from the motor screen in the configuration editor to access nonstandard optional parameters). The string value of the parameter can contain a sequence of S and/or D commands separated by semicolons to configure the I/O points, such as:

S1=2,0,1;S2=3,0,1

That string would set input 1 as the plus limit, input 2 as the minus limit and both inputs as active low and current sources.

The "init_sequence" commands will be sent when reading the config file on start up or after reconfig. The default initialization sequence is the following:

S1=2,0;S2=3,0;S3=1,1

That command will be sent prior to any "init_sequence" commands, but the assignments made using "init_sequence" will override the default sequence. Only S and D assignments are allowed in the sequence. See the MDrive programming manual for proper syntax for using the S and D commands. Also, the semicolons are not part of the MDrive syntax. spec will format the commands correctly when sent to the controller.

Fix For -l logfile Crash

A bug introduced in release 6.02 that resulted in a crash when the -l logfile start-up option was used has been fixed.

Fixes For Background Subtraction With the Plotting Macros

Support for the background-subtraction feature in the plotting macros has been updated to restore functionality which disappeared with the spec 6.02 release. The ability to enable the feature is back in the setplot macro. After updating the spec installation, use the newmac command to load the revised macros.

The background-subtraction feature calculates a linear background using the endpoints of the scan for the counters selected for plotting with the plotselect or counters commands, subtracts that background from the data in SCAN_D and places the results in an array called SCAN_B. One can use the setplot macro to enable or disable background-subtraction or simply assign a value to the global variable BG. A nonzero value enables background subtraction. The commands splot, pts, lp_plot and plot use SCAN_B if BG is nonzero. The values CEN, pl_MIN, pl_MAX, pl_FWHM, etc. are calculated from the SCAN_B data after calling splot, pts, lp_plot or plot when background-subtraction is enabled. One of those macros needs to be called after setting BG to zero to have CEN, etc., calculated from SCAN_D.

Fix For Display Of Macros containing Non-ASCII Text

The prdef command and the show_state utility will now use octal escape sequences for non-ASCII bytes in the macro definition. Previously, characters with bit 8 set would display as a backslash followed by the ASCII representation of the remaining seven bits.

Fix For Output File Reference After Directory Change

Release 5.07.03-4 (fall 2007) broke a feature associated with output files and described in the spec Reference Manual as "spec remembers the directory the files are in when they are first opened. If the user changes spec's current directory, open files may be referenced either by the name with which the files were opened or by the correct path name relative to the current directory." That bug is now fixed.

Update To Macro-Hardware Motor "search" Keyword

The macro-hardware motor _cmd() function call for with keyword "search" has been modified so that the p2 parameter will only be set if the underlying chg_dial() function is called with an optional third argument or if the optional "home_position" parameter is set. See the mac_hdw help file for details.

Support For Measurement Computing USB-CTR4 and USB-CTR8

spec supports the new USB-CTR4 and USB-CTR8 counter/timer modules from Measurement Computing. See the usbctr help file for details.

Backlash Compensation Support For Phytron PhyMotion Controllers

spec now programs the backlash compensation parameter (P25) on the Phytron PhyMotion controllers. When this parameter is set the controller will perform backlash compensation as part of a single move command. Normally, spec programs two moves when backlash is required.

Updates For splot Utility

The splot utility will now create a pop-up error window if there are problems opening a data file instead of silently fail. The code for identifying scan types from the scan name is now more robust.

Fix For CEN and Related Values

The quantities CEN, pl_MIN, pl_FWHM and related values use the symbol PL_Y1 in their calculations. PL_Y1 contains the detector column number in the data array (usually SCAN_D). With the updated plotting macros in spec release 6.02, the column number depends on the number of motors in the scan, but the macros did not update PL_Y1 when the number of motors changed. That issue is fixed in this release.

Fix For tango_put() Of Associative Arrays

A bug in the spec release 6.02 TANGO updates, where a tango_put() of an associative array did not include the last element of the array, has been fixed.

Fix For counter_par() Crash with PCI Counter/Timers

A crash that could occur when using counter_par() to access hardware features when PCI counter/timers were configured but not installed in the computer has been fixed. Affected cards were any of the am9513 based PCI cards, the National Instruments 6601 and 6602 PCI cards and the National Instruments X series PCIe cards.

Fixes For splot Utility

An issue where the splot utility could not read data files that contained motor scans of three or more motors (a3scan, a4scan, etc.) has been fixed. Another issue, where the FWHM was displayed with a negative number for scans that went from high to low values, has also been fixed.

Support For HP/Agilent E2050/E5810 LAN/GPIB Gateway

This spec release includes initial support for the HP E2050 and Agilent E5810 LAN/GPIB gateway controllers.

Introduction

Welcome to spec release 6.02. In addition to the usual assortment of new hardware support and bug fixes, this release has some noteworthy new features. The notes below are divided into four sections: new features, macro updates, bug fixes and hardware support. (The following notes are consolidated and reorganized from the 6.01 beta release notes, which are in the chg6_01 help file.)

First of the new features is the new interactive plotting utility called splot. splot not only does real-time plots of scan data, but also can read and display scans from spec data files. In addition, splot has controls to send commands to spec to position motors and start scans. Note, though, spec must be run in server mode (use the -S flag when starting) for splot to send commands to position motors or start scans.

Another added feature is the new built-in spec_menu() function that provides interactive menu configuration capabilities. The standard setplot, plotselect and setshow macros have been replaced with versions that use spec_menu(). A new mstartup macro replaces much of the configuration provided by the old startup macro. Additional menu-ized configuration macros will be forthcoming.

A new set of continuous scan macros, cscan, c2scan, cmesh, etc., performs rapid scans where the counters are read continuously as the motors move steadily from the start to end specified positions.

Be sure to either start fresh, as in spec -f, or run the newmac macro to read in the updated macros. Run setplot to choose to run the new splot utility.

Please read through the update notes below for a full list of updates. We at CSS look forward to your feedback. Thanks!

New splot Utility

A new stand-alone plotting utility called splot is introduced with this spec release. The splot program is intended to replace the standard x11filt window and provide additional functions. The splot program uses shared-memory data arrays and spec server/client protocols to communicate with the spec process.

The splot program is written in Python and requires the PyQt4 and PyQwt5 packages. A script called install_splot_needs is included in the spec distribution that will try to install the required packages and their dependencies. One can also install the needed packages using whatever tools the particular Linux distribution includes.

To use the supplied script, go to the spec distribution directory and type:

sudo ./install_splot_needs [-y]

The -y flag means the package installation programs will assume a yes in response to queries to confirm additional package installation. The package installations programs (yum or apt-get, depending on Linux distribution) will likely download a dozen or more additional packages.

Note, the x11filt plotting is still available and can be used simultaneously with or instead of splot. Use the setplot macro to configure plotting.

New splot_cntl() Built-In Function

To support the tight integration of the new splot utility with spec, a new splot_cntl() function is provided to send and receive splot messages. .. See the splot_cntl help file for details.

New spec_menu() Function

A new function named spec_menu() is available for creating interactive menus. See the spec_menu help file.

array_plot() Will Now Plot One-Dimensional Arrays

The array_plot() function has been updated to plot one-dimensional data arrays, such as may be read from an MCA device. For such plots, the x-axis is set to the point number.

Unlimited Number Of Output Files

Previous releases of spec limited the number of open files (using the open(), on() or fprintf() functions) to 25. With this spec release, the built-in limit is removed. The number of files that can be opened is only constrained by the system limits.

Note, it is not a good idea to run up against the system limit. Some spec commands will cease to work if no more file descriptors are available from the system. Make sure that macros that open files have provision to close the files when no longer needed. Note also, the spec_par() "auto_file_close" option can be set to have spec automatically close files that haven't been accessed in the specified time. See the spec_par help file for details.

New Built-In OUTFILES Associative Array

spec will now maintain an associative array named OUTFILES that will hold information about all open output files. OUTFILES is a two-dimensional array. The first index is the name by which the file was opened using open(), on(), fprintf() or the -l outputfile start-up option. The element value for a second index of "name" is the first index. The element value for a second index of "path" is the full path name of the file. Additional elements may be added in the future. For example:

1048.FOURC> for (i in OUTFILES[]["name"])
1049.more>    printf("%10s %s\n", OUTFILES[i]["name"], OUTFILES[i]["path"])
      dlog /private/tmp/dlog
     data1 /private/tmp/data1
       tty /dev/tty
 /dev/null /dev/null

or

1053.FOURC> p OUTFILES[DATAFILE]["path"]
/private/tmp/data1

Note, the special built-in name "pipe" is not included in OUTFILES. The special built-in name "/dev/null" includes the full path in both "name" and "path" to work with the standard macros that always refer to that special file by the full path name.

New Filename Completion For do and qdo Macro Commands

Although do and qdo are defined as standard user-level macros, filename completion code has been added to automatically include directory paths contained in the global variable DO_DIR. Macro support for path lists in DO_DIR was added to the standard macros in spec release 6.00.05. Filename completion is available when spec is linked with the libedit or readline libraries.

Support For 64-Bit Integer Data Arrays

New keywords long64 and ulong64 are available to create 64-bit signed and unsigned integer data arrays, respectively. The 64-bit arrays can be used in all contexts that accept array data types. Note, though, spec will only work with 52 bits of precision in some contexts, since the internal code uses double-precision floating point format for many operations associated with spec user-level symbols. (Double floats use 52 bits for the significand and the remaining 12 bits for sign and exponent). The spec_shm.h and spec_server.h files included in the spec distribution have been updated to include definitions for 64-bit data-array data types.

The fmt_read() and fmt_write() Functions Now Work With Subarrays

The fmt_read() and fmt_write() commands, used to read and write binary data in standard and user-created formats, will now work using subarray syntax. Previously, the commands only worked with full data arrays.

New input() Option To Read Arrow Keys and Forward Delete

The cbreak mode for input() now has an option to return special codes when arrow keys or the forward-delete key are pressed. Type h input at the spec prompt or see the funcs help file for details.

New IS_SERVER Built-In Variable

A new built-in variable named IS_SERVER will be nonzero if spec is running in server mode (invoked with the -S option). When in server mode, IS_SERVER will be set to the port number on which the spec server is listening.

New HOSTNAME Built-In Variable

A new built-in variable named HOSTNAME will be set to the hostname of the computer running spec.

New Flexibility For Identifying spec Server

The configuration of spec server motors and counters and the built-in functions for communicating with a spec server all require an argument of the form host:port or host:spec to identify the host and the port on which the server is listening. With this new release, if the host part of the string is missing, spec will use "localhost". In addition, it is now allowed to mix references to the same server by port number and by spec process name. See the server help file for details.

Improvements For remote_stat()

spec will now include a check for pending connections to spec servers during a call of remote_stat(), making it possible for a loop that tests the return value of remote_stat() to determine when a server connection comes up.

Also, remote_stat() will no longer return "lost" for a previously open connection after a new call of remote_par(..., "connect") for the same host is made.

Length Of Allowed Input Line Increased

The maximum length of input records has been increased from 512 to 4096 bytes.

"SignedInteger" Recognized As an ESRF Data Format Data Type

Some programs that use the ESRF data format (EDF) use "SignedInteger" instead of "SignedLong" to characterize the 32-bit integer data type. The fmt_esrf.c file included in the spec distribution that implements the EDF format for the fmt_read() and fmt_write() functions now recognizes "SignedInteger" as a data type.

New Continuous Scan Macros

New cscan, c2scan, c3scan, c4scan and cmesh standard macros for on-the-fly scans are included with this spec release. With these scans, the counters and motor positions are read continuously as the motors move from the start to end positions. The scan arguments include the start and finish positions for each motor and the total time for the scan. The speed of each motor will be set to approximate that scan time. An additional optional argument specifies a sleep interval before each counter reading. The cmesh scan does a series of single motor on-the-fly scans as an additional motor is stepped through a specified range. The scan direction is reversed after each on-the-fly scan to minimize overhead time. See the comments in the cscan.mac source file for details.

Move Macros Now Allow Variables For Motor Mnemonics

The _mmov internal macro used by the standard motor-move macros (mv, umv, mvr, umvr, mvd and umvd) will now work if the motor number or mnemonic argument is a variable. For example:

for (i = 0; i < 5; i++) mv i 10

will move motors 0 through 4. Similarly:

{ par="phi"; umv par 4; par=th; umv par 1 }

will work. In the first instance, the symbol par is assigned a string version of the motor mnemonic. In the second, par is assigned the number value of the mnemonic.

Name-Space Issues with Moving and Counting Macros Addressed

The local variable names used within the _mmov macro (used by mv, umv, mvr, umvr, mvd and umvd) now all start with an underscore to lessen the chance of a name conflict with local definitions in user_getangles, user_premove, user_postmove, etc.

In addition, get_angles in the wm and _update() macros has been replaced with a new macro function called get_angles_func(). The new macro function serves as a wrapper to get_angles, insulating local variables that appear in user_getangles from symbols used in the calling macros. A get_counts_func() provides a similar wrapper to get_counts and is used in the updating counting macro uct.

Fix For Display of Disabled Counters In uct

The uct macro has been fixed to properly format the display when disabled counters are included.

Update For counters Macro

Counter names, in addition to counter numbers and mnemonics, are now included in the list of counters displayed with the counters and show_counters() macros.

Updated and Improved Plotting Macros

The standard plotting macros have been updated and revised to fix some old problems and to accommodate the new splot utility, which is an alternative to the standard spec x11filt plots.

The SCAN_D data array now defaults to a shared-memory object to accommodate the splot program. In addition, SCAN_D now includes data for all the configured counters at each data point along with HKL values for motor scans that include geometry motors.

New scan_info_update() and scan_meta_update() macros have been worked into the standard macros to fill the shared memory info and meta region with details of the spec configuration and scan status for the benefit of splot.

Many of the internal macros have been reworked. If a site's local macros use internal macros from the macros/plotarray.mac file, those local macros should be checked and possibly revised to maintain compatibility.

Epoch Now Saved To Data File With Added Precision

The default _loop macro, called at each point of the standard scans, will now save the epoch value for each scan point to millisecond resolution. Previously, the value was saved as an integer. The value is the difference between the current time and value of the EPOCH variable. The value for EPOCH is set to the current time when a new data file is created and is saved in the data file header.

Revised setplot, plotselect and setshow Macros Use New spec_menu()

The setplot macro to configure the scan plots, the plotselect macro to select which counters to plot and the setshow macro to configure motor and counter screen displays now use the new spec_menu() function.

New mstartup Macro

A new mstartup macro (for menu startup) uses the new spec_menu() function and replaces much of the functionality of the standard startup macro.

New CP_FILTER_CMD Option For cplot_plot Macro

The standard cplot_plot macro now recognizes a CP_FILTER_CMD global variable. If it exists, the cplot_plot macro will evaluate its string value to create a dynamic CP_FILTER command. For example, the following will produce pdf files using the C-PLOT pdf filter containing the current scan number as part of the pdf filename:

CP_FILTER_CMD = 'sprintf("pdf scan_%04d.pdf", SCAN_N)'

See the macro source file macros/cplot.mac in the spec distribution for implementation details.

New COUNT_FMT_MAXCH Option For Updated Counting

The number of counters displayed while doing an updated count with the uct macro can be limited to the number of counters in the new global variable COUNT_FMT_MAXCH. If the value is zero, all the counters will be displayed. The setshow macro will prompt for a value.

newfile Macro Updated and Reorganized

The standard newfile macro has been reorganized and now does the bulk of its work in macro functions. The arguments are checked and the file created in newfile_f(). That macro calls newfile_head() to create the file header. The newfile_f() macro is also called from the new mstartup macro.

A new user_newfile macro hook is called at the end of newfile_f(). By default, the macro is empty. Also, user_newfile and user_filehead are now wrapped in macro functions to avoid name-space conflicts with the local variables in the newfile macros.

Finally, the chk_file utility that used to be used to test if an existing file begins with the standard header has been replaced with calls of built-in spec functions.

See the macro source file macros/file.mac in the spec distribution for implementation details.

Fix For Drifting Pseudomotors

An old problem associated with the internal rounding of motor positions calculated for pseudomotors from real motors or for real motors from pseudomotors, such as with a kappa head on a fourc, fivec or psic diffractometer, has been addressed. The rounding may have led to position drift during repetitive movements in certain configurations.

Fix For x11filt Retained-Pixmap Mode Text Garbling

The x11filt plotting utility can use either backing store or a retained-pixmap to maintain content that is drawn when the plot window itself is not visible. Backing store is a server feature. The retained pixmap is implemented within the x11filt code. The default mode for x11filt is to use backing store, but on some platforms the default X server configuration has backing store disabled. In that mode, x11filt uses the retained pixmap. An old (twenty-one year) bug associated with writing labels to the x11filt retained-pixmap buffer that resulted in garbled labels when a window becomes visible that had been updated when hidden has been fixed.

Fix For array_copy()

A bug, where an "Out of temporary cells" message would appear after somewhat less than 20 calls of the new array_copy() function (but only when the first argument was a subarray), has been fixed.

Fixes For Server/Client Issues

Several old issues with spec server/client mode have been addressed. A bug where a client may not find a previously open server specified by host and port number when the client is already attached to multiple servers has been fixed. A deadlock hang in server mode that could occur if a keyboard ^C came while socket connections were being opened from both the main thread and the server read thread has been eliminated.

Fix For Rare Crash In Server Mode

When running in server mode, a mutual-exclusion lock around the code that spec uses to maintain the list of socket connections now exists. Previously, data corruption and a crash could sometimes occur if clients were making and breaking connections to a spec server that was also making socket connections from the main command loop. This flaw has been present since the introduction of spec's server mode.

Fix For Detection of Invalid Octal Values In Strings

An old issue where strings starting with the characters "08" or "09" would evaluate to zero in certain contexts, in particular in conditional statements, has been fixed. The problem was that the C code improperly identified the strings as octal constants because of the leading zero, but a scan for an octal number would return a zero value since 8 and 9 are not valid octal digits.

Fix For date() Glitch

A bug in the date() implementation where two successive values for the time of day displayed using the format date("%s.%.6") could result in anomalous values such as:

1382650482.99999905 1382650482.00001097,

where the second invocation shows an earlier time than the first, has been fixed. Note, a more straightforward way to obtain the same information is using the time() function, which never had such an issue.

Fix For decode() Of Two-Dimensional Associative Arrays

The built-in decode() function will now properly decode two-dimensional associative arrays. See the encode help file for details on encode() and decode().

Fixes For array_dump() To File

A problem when calling array_dump() where the specified file could not be opened and spec would show the same error message repeatedly has been fixed. Also, a small memory leak when calling array_dump() with the optional filename argument has fixed fixed.

Duplicate Port Numbers In sock_par("show") Eliminated

The strings printed with sock_par("show") and returned by sock_par("info") no longer list the same port number twice after the host.

Fix For Counter Mnemonic Check In Configuration Editor

A old bug in the configuration editor, where a check for illegal use of spaces in the counter mnemonics was applied to strings in row 2 of the scaler screen and not the mnemonics in column 2, has been fixed.

Fix For tango_put()

An old programming error in the implementation of the tango_put() function that has only recently manifested on 64-bit Linux builds has been fixed. Before the fix, a tango_put() call of a scalar attribute could pass an incorrect value.

Support For National Instruments X Series Counter/Timers

The National Instruments 6300 X series PCIe and PXIe 6300 boards are now supported as counter/timers. The digital I/O capabilities of the boards can also be used. The analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog capabilities are not yet supported. See the ni63xx help file for details.

Hardware Support For the New Focus 8742 Motor Controller

This release includes initial support for the New Focus (Newport) model 8742 Picmotor Controller/Driver. The current support is limited to the Ethernet interface. The USB interface and RS-458 network support will be added when needed.

Support For SmarAct SCU Motor Controllers

spec now supports the SmarAct SCU model motor controller in addition to the MCS model already supported. See the smaract help file for details.

Support For C400 Counter/Timer

This spec release contains support for the C400 counter/timer made by Pyramid Technical Consultants and sold by FMB-Oxford. The spec support is over the serial interface only. See the c400 help file.

Preliminary Support For Trinamic TMCL Motor Controllers

This spec release contains preliminary support for the TMCL line of motor controllers from Trinamic. Both serial and CAN interfaces are supported.

Preliminary Support For Phytron PhyMotion Motor Controllers

This spec release contains preliminary support for the Phytron PhyMotion motor controllers over a socket interface. The configuration editor controller type is PHYMO.

New Serial Baud Rate and Other Fixes

spec now recognizes a baud rate or 600000 for serial devices. In addition, some issues with the code to set certain non-standard baud rates (7200, 14400 and 28800) on Linux have been addressed.

Updated Behavior For Several Motor Controllers

An update to the motor control error handling will now abort the move if an error occurs during the "prestart_one" and "prestart_all" phase of sending the commands. A handful of motor controllers are affected by this change, namely the Oriel 18092, Advanced Control System MCU, Missouri Research Reactor motors, MicroMo MVP-2001, New Focus Picomotor 875x, Newport XPS, SPring-8 Equipment Manager motors, along with the macro hardware motor support. In practice, one is not likely to see any difference in behavior with the real motor controllers. However, the updated behavior may be useful with the macro hardware motor support.

Updates For the Newport XPS Motor Controllers

Previously, spec would automatically send the home-search command to a Newport XPS motor group if the XPS reported that motors in the group were in the not-referenced state. When an XPS motor is in the not-referenced state, nothing can be done with the motor until the home-search command has been sent. This spec release changes the default behavior so that the home-search command is not sent automatically. Instead, a message is printed during hardware configuration or when a move is attempted telling the user that the home command must be run.

The previous default behavior of automatic home-search can be restored on a controller-wide basis by adding the non-standard optional controller parameter "auto_home" to the hardware configuration file. A value of 1 for the parameter will allow spec to send the home-search command during hardware configuration. A value of 2 will allow spec to send the home-search command any time it is needed.

The 19 additional states added to the XPS internal state machine since the original spec XPS support was written are now recognized.

spec will now show warning messages if a move is halted by the controller putting a motor in the disabled state because of a following error (or several other conditions).

If a motor reports it is in the not-initialized state due to the error "both ends of run activated", spec assumes that to mean the motor is disconnected and disables access to that motor to avoid continued error messages. To re-enable access to the motor, it is necessary to fix the problem and restart spec or run the reconfig command.

Some problems with configuring XPS motor groups with more than one motor have been addressed. (Apparently, nobody had been using that configuration with spec.) Yet to be resolved are issues where spec sends commands to perform backlash. This issue can be worked around by configuring backlash in the XPS system file and setting the spec backlash parameter to zero.

Finally, the commands to set speed and acceleration are handled more efficiently.

Improved Abort Handling for ACS MCB-4B Motor Controller

A problem with the ACS MCB-4B motor controller, where communication errors occurred after sending a motor-stop command associated with a ^C user abort, has been addressed. spec now gives the controller motors time to decelerate before sending a command after sending the stop command, as the controller firmware appears to require such a delay.

Several TANGO Updates

The tango_get() and tango_put() functions have new usage options to read or set multiple attributes in a single call. See the updated tango help file for details.

The tango_get() return value can now be used to check if the data quality of the values read is "invalid".

Calling any of the tango_io(), tango_get() and tango_put() functions with an invalid attribute is no longer a fatal error. Instead, spec will return -1 and place a message in TANGO_ERR.

The tango_io(), tango_get() and tango_put() should now work well with associative array and all data array input and output types for any array (spectrum or image) TANGO data type.

If a return argument is included for tango_io() scalar-valued commands, tango_io() will return zero on success and place the return value in the supplied argument.

TANGO_ERR can now be assigned a numeric -1 value rather than the string "-1" to suppress error messages on the next call of the TANGO functions.

spec now supports the DEVVAR_LONG64ARRAY and DEVVAR_ULONG64ARRAY as input and output types for tango_io(), as input types for tango_get() and as output types for tango_put().

Include install_splot_needs Script In Distribution

The install_splot_needs script is now included in the distribution.

Updated setplot Macro

A number of splot-related options, such as symbol size and whether to display a grid have been added to the setplot macro.

Fixes For splot_cntl() Function

The splot_cntl() function has been updated to require semicolons to separate multiple commands in order to be able to parse the options associated with the "plot" command.

Faster splot Start Up

The server connection to the splot program is now faster on start up.

Updated Newport XPS Support

The Newport XPS motor controller code will now show warning messages if a move stops because of a following error or any of the other events that cause the controller to put the axis in a disabled state. Also, the commands to set the motor speed and acceleration are now done more efficiently.