IMCA-CAT News

During October there have been three episodes of pins being stuck in pucks where the robot pulled the puck off the dewar base plate. We believe this is due to the base being out of specification and becoming stuck on the puck magnet.

The Hampton HT bases with the painted bar code and ALS-style bases appear to be made too small to reliably fit in the ACTOR pucks. These two base styles were responsible for two of the robot accidents this month.

We have sizing pins that we will distribute to check the size of the bases.

The following bases have shown to be problematic:

Hampton CrystalCap HT or Copper HT w/2D code (HR8-1*) Hampton CrystalCap Magnetic ALS (HR4-779) Hampton CrystalCap Copper Magnetic ALS Any other Hampton base with a painted bar code.

The following bases are recommended:

MiTeGen: any base Molecular Dimensions: any base Hampton: CrystalCap Magnetic (HR4-731, HR4-733, HR4-902) Hampton: CrystalCap Copper Magnetic Hampton: CrystalCap HT, no 2D code (HR8-094) Any base made to the SPINE specification.

1. UPDATE: 20 Nov 2013 #######

MiTeGen supplied us with 500 of their bases to test (100 of each style) and all of them passed the gauge pin test. While this is a rather small sample, we are reasonably confident that their bases will work and can recommend them for use with the ACTOR pucks.

The ACTOR robot end effector has been repaired and is expected to be delivered to the beam line tomorrow (Oct 17) morning. Once the end effector is reinstalled and tested we will resume the original data collection schedule with remote users tomorrow.

The robot end effector was damaged in a collision caused by a pin stuck in a magazine. The end effector has been returned for repair and a loaner is not currently available from Rigaku. Automated sample mounting is not available until we receive a loaner or our repaired unit, possibly by the beginning of next week.

The dewar lid for Sample Dewar #1 is fixed and all three dewars are in service. -EZ

JDirector 2.2.1_imca25 has been released. This update adds support for scan vector visualization as well as other improvements.

• Added support for scan vector visualization in the crystal view. Now, if you've defined a vector in a scan in the Image Collection view, you can see a graphical overlay of that vector in the crystal view.
• Improved scan vector definition workflow. Made vector start and end point text fields in Image Collection view scan editor uneditable. On sample dismount, all vector start and end points defined in Image Collection view scans are deleted automatically. This avoids keeping meaningless vector definitions around, and it makes it less confusing to define a new vector on a subsequent sample.
• Improved auto mode job handling of a sample with a missing pin. Rather than stopping the job, JDirector now skips the sample with the missing pin and continues on to the next sample.
• Improved manual centering by clearing the mark on the crystal view after performing a manual center. Previously, after moving to the new center position and refreshing the crystal view, the mark was still displayed in the crystal view but at the old position. We considered this to be confusing. Now, the mark is cleared after performing the manual center.
• Fixed a bug where commanding an aperture retract from the crystal view could cause the UI to become unresponsive.
• Fixed a bug where commanding a backlight insert or retract from the crystal view could cause the UI to become unresponsive.
• Improved inserting and retracting the backlight from the crystal view by refreshing the camera image after every backlight insert and retract command regardless of whether JDirector thinks the backlight position has changed.
• Fixed a bug in manual diffraction center visualization where the diffraction center overlays on the crystal view were not being hidden when the diffraction center dialog was closed.
• Fixed a bug in the manual diffraction center dialog where the size of the dialog was reset every time it was closed and opened again.
• Improved the Clear Marks button on the crystal view so that it will clear the loop outline from an auto center.

The lid for sample dewar #1 stopped heating and was taken out of service. Troubleshooting discovered a bad thermocouple in the lid. There are two thermocouples installed as redundancy but the good one was apparently not making contact to the connector. The connector has been fixed so that the good thermocouple is working. Lid will be tested when time allows. Replacement of the bad thermocouple in the lid assembly will have to be done by Rigaku when time allows. - EZ

The 5 micron aperture assembly (50, 20, 10, 5um) is currently the default at 17ID due to problems with the 20um setting on the other assembly (300, 50, 20, 10). Full beam can still be used by selecting 'none' for aperture size.

Imcadr 0.25.4 has been released. This update fixes a bug in Labelit scoring.

• When performing diffraction center scoring with Labelit, changed to compute the score as a function of the good Bragg candidates total. This fixes a bug introduced in version 0.18.0 (released in March 2013) where the score was computed as a function of the spot total when it should have been computed as a function of the good Bragg candidates total. JDirector uses Imcadr for diffraction centering, so this bug has existed in JDirector since March as well and is now fixed.

JDirector 2.2.1_imca23 has been released. This update improves the reliability of auto mode diffraction centering when run in a NoMachine NX session.

• Increased the auto mode diffraction center step XYZ stage initialize timeout from 10 seconds to 3 minutes to ensure it won't bogusly time out during an inopportune NoMachine NX session disconnect or connect.

JDirector 2.2.1_imca22 has been released. This update adds support for path expansion in the diffraction center dialog.

• Added an expansion of the raster images folder path in the diffraction center dialog to make it easy to see what the path will expand to. This also makes it consistent with the scan template expansion in the scan editor.