Welcome to ESIBD Explorer’s documentation!

The ESIBD Explorer controls various devices that are used in experimental setups, such as power supplies, temperature sensors, pressure sensors, current meters, lasers and many more. Originally developed for Electrospray Ion-Beam Deposition (ESIBD), it has been used to optimize and characterize ion-beam energy, beam intensity, and beam size, as well as monitoring deposited charge.

Thanks to a plugin system and templates it is now possible to add support for custom devices, scan modes, and more using only a few lines of code. ESIBD Explorer can therefore be used for a broad range of experiments beyond ESIBD.

ESIBD Explorer follows the core philosophy that the user should only see and interact with physically relevant experimental parameters. Core information and features should be accessible with as little clicks as possible. This is to allow researchers to focus on the science, instead of getting distracted by hardware specific implementations and repetitive manual tasks.

It does make it easy to generate a consistent user interface for your custom hardware and data, and takes care of saving and loading data, metadata, and settings. Generated files allow to restore all relevant settings to reproduce an experiment.

It does not write device specific code for you. It is recommended to create and test a standalone script for all required device communication before creating your custom plugin. It does not eliminate the need to learn basic Python and PyQt independently if you want to create more advanced plugins. That said, the existing plugins can be a great resource to get started and in many cases it is sufficient to inherit from an existing plugin and make minor modifications.

Most features should be self-evident from the user interface allowing to use ESIBD Explorer intuitively and without memorizing a lengthy manual. (see tooltips and integrated plugin documentation!). However, there is a User’s Guide that covers the main functionality in more detail to make sure you can make the most use of it. Please get in touch if you have any feature requests or bug reports.

ESIBD Explorer is implemented based on Python 3.11 and PyQt6. It is running on Microsoft Windows 10 or higher. Use on Linux and MacOS is possible but not extensively tested. ESIBD Explorer is distributed under the GNU General Public License. There is no guarantee in case of any hardware damage or data loss due to malfunction of ESIBD Explorer. Users are responsible for backing up their own data and configuration files.

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