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"Collect" users manual

Purpose

Using "collect" you can:

Calculate efficient measurement strategies, taking symmetry of the dataset and the orientation of the crystal into account if desired.
Study the symmetry of the data using scans in particular settings of the crystal.
Measure the relative dimensions of the crystal for absorption correction.
Resume measurements after power- or network failures.

Collect GUI rules

One important rule in the user interface: if something is "properly configured" or "ready", it will be shown in green. If something still needs to be configured, it will be displayed in red. Work in progress will appear in yellow.

Another rule is: if an action requires a parameter to be configured, it will automatically pop up a dialog box to that purpose. Thus, you can always start by pressing the last button in a sequence, and the program will go through all necessary steps to get there. Think of it this way: a good "Graphical User Interface" for a crystallographer has only one button: "publish". If that button is pressed, the first dialog that pops up is one asking to mount the crystal. We're not there yet, but trying hard!

Different experiments

Once the "collect" program is started, a window appears on the screen.

Collect main window; no experiment active

In the "File" menu you can select a "New experiment" to be performed.

File menu Experiment submenu

Only experiments for which you have all required external software will be shown in the list. In particular, if the configuration file doesn't say that "dirax" is installed on the system, you will not be offered a phi/chi cell determination experiment.

The particularities of the experiment appear in the window.

Experiments can be saved to disk and restored at a later time. File names with extension ".non" are reserved for this purpose.

For a description of each of the experiments, see their respective manuals:

Command line arguments

Collect can be called with the name of an existing ".non" file as command line argument. It will then resume that saved experiment.

To start a new experiment, collect can be called as:

collect new <expname> [nonfile]

Here "nonfile" should specify a nonexisting .non file, and "<expname>" is one of "datcol" "index" "phichi" "orient" "powder" or "xtalmovie".

If the argument "winout" is given, collect will open a window to collect all debugging and text output instead of printing it on the terminal window where collect was started from. This window will be iconified from the start, and it will be titled "Collect text output".

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