A 9-angle scan takes hours, and an angle that responds poorly still produces
rows that look structurally fine in the file — the SAW packet is just not
there. This lets the operator walk the angles first, parking the rig at a
random point in each, and judge the response before committing to the run.
Nothing reads the scope. The operator inspects the instrument directly, so
there is no transfer path, no plotting, and no waveform crossing the module
boundary — test_inspection_never_reads_a_waveform_back pins that, since it is
the kind of premise a later change erodes without noticing.
core/scope_inspect.py — the scope state worth looking at, which is not the
scan's state:
- plain rising-edge trigger on CH2 at 2.0 V, not the scan's logic AND of the
laser pulse and the stage gate, so a stationary stage still triggers
- FastFrame off, SAMPLE (no averaging) — a weak or intermittent response is
exactly what is being looked for, and averaging would hide it
- free-running (STOPAfter RUNSTop + STATE RUN) so the trace keeps updating
while the operator looks at it
- CH1 keeps the acquisition front-end verbatim, so what is on screen is what
a scan would record
- CH3/CH4 become bias monitors sharing one scale and position, since the
comparison is by eye and only works if a division means the same on each.
100 mV/div with ground 3.5 divisions below centre puts 0–700 mV on screen
with headroom on an 8- or 10-division graticule (the signal never goes
negative, hence moving the trace down).
core/angle_inspect.py — AngleInspector, headless and Qt-free like ScanEngine.
Points are drawn from the angle's own bounding box: Y from its actual row
positions and X uniformly across its data window, so the point is somewhere
the scan would really sample rather than merely inside the box. New Point
re-rolls without rotating, which is what separates a bad spot on the sample
from a bad angle. The stage gate is held off throughout, and the rotator goes
home on stop.
gui/inspect_bridge.py — QtAngleInspector on the existing QueueWorker base.
Inspection is click-driven rather than one long run, so the worker blocks on
its queue between commands and an open window costs nothing. BBD position
polling is suppressed while inspecting, for the same reason the scan does it:
the shared TX queue.
sc3_aui_app.py — AngleInspectWindow (angle list, prev/next, New Point) driven
off the plan currently entered in the scan panel, so it inspects exactly the
scan about to be run. Navigation locks while the stage moves. The list syncs
via itemClicked rather than currentRowChanged, so echoing the worker's
position back does not re-trigger the move it is reporting.
README picks up the new modules, and scope_burst.py which the previous merge
left out of the structure listing. 114 tests passing, ruff clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A mis-triggered row cannot be written as it arrived — v6 declares n_frames per
row in the header and has no per-row length field, so a short or long row
would shift every later row in the file. Until now the only policy was to
square it up, which keeps the scan running but leaves the affected row
indistinguishable from a good one afterwards: nothing in the file records that
it was padded.
strict_rows selects the other trade. On any frame-count mismatch the scan
stops instead of writing the row, so a data run either produces rows that mean
what the header says they mean or fails loudly. Default stays pad, so existing
behaviour is unchanged.
_warn_frame_delta becomes _check_frame_delta, since it now decides rather than
just reports. Both acquisition paths already call it before writing anything
for the row (CH1 leads SCAN_CHANNELS, and the burst path checks every row up
front), so an abort leaves the file on a whole-row boundary rather than a
half-written row — test_strict_row_packing_writes_nothing_for_the_failed_row
pins that.
Plumbed through QtScanController to a checkbox in the scan panel, persisted in
ScanDefaults alongside burst_mode. scan_format.md documents both policies and
notes that the choice is not recorded in the file.
The row-clipping setup in the padding test is now a _clip_one_row helper,
reused by the strict tests. 92 tests passing, ruff clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Wires the burst_mode flag through QtScanController to ScanEngine and adds a
checkbox to the scan panel. The setting persists via ScanDefaults like the
other scan fields, defaulting to off — per-row acquisition stays the default
path until burst mode has run on the rig and the gate-off preflight has
settled which TRIGOUT value idles the pin low.
scan_format.md — the acquisition settings table had drifted from the code it
claimed to describe: it attributed the settings to sc3_aui_app.py (they moved
to core/scope_sras.py in the Phase 2 extraction), listed a 1.24 V trigger
level and 0 % offset where the code sets 0.500 V and HORizontal:POSition 30,
and did not mention the logic-AND scan trigger at all. Corrected, pointed at
the module that actually owns them, and noted that none of it affects byte
layout — only where the acoustic packet lands inside a frame.
Added an acquisition-paths section: the two paths write byte-identical files
and the choice is a runtime flag that is not recorded in the file, so a
reader never needs to care which produced it. Documents where row boundaries
come from in a burst and that either path squares rows up to n_frames.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Thomas Ales