The operator frames a good spot, confirms the two DC levels the detector
reads there, and the rig then measures its own tilt: step 1.5 mm either side
on X and then on Y, and tilt the platform until those levels come back. The
correction that fixes an offset point is the correction that levels the whole
travel — height error and tilt effect are both proportional to the offset —
so the procedure ends by applying it and leaving it applied.
Both directions are measured from the same starting tilt and averaged, which
makes their disagreement a flatness read-out rather than something averaged
away silently.
core/auto_align.py holds the geometry and the search, Qt-free. The three
T-axes' azimuths are the whole geometry: T1 lies along +X so it alone tilts
along X, and T0/T2 move as an equal-and-opposite pair to tilt along Y without
touching X (tilt_response derives that, and the tests pin it — an axis map
that drifts would still converge, on the wrong axis). The search is a secant
null on the split-detector difference: probe once to learn what a microstep
is worth, sign included, then step at the null. It refuses to servo on a
scope that has not re-triggered, escalates a probe that reads as no response
before calling an axis dead, and stops at a per-axis travel limit.
gui/align_bridge.py runs it on a worker thread; stopping is a threading.Event
rather than a queued command, because the worker is inside a long handler for
the whole run. The camera window carries the button and the progress window,
and locks the scan panel and the jog pads while a run owns the stage.
Adds immediate MEAN measurements and an acquisition count to the scope
driver, and read_bias_mv to core/scope_inspect — the one scalar the
inspection state was missing.
KNOWN_ISSUES.md records what only the rig can settle: the probe step, the
travel limit, the hold current, and whether the piston the X phase applies
alongside its tilt matters.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
gui/qt_workers.py — one QueueWorker base replaces the per-device command
queue + dispatch + signal boilerplate. The loop blocks on the queue
instead of waking 10-20x/second forever (test_idle_worker_does_not_spin
asserts an idle worker burns ~no CPU). PollingQueueWorker adds
self-rescheduling polling: the next poll is queued only after the
previous finishes, so a device slower than the interval can't accumulate
a backlog (test_polling_never_overlaps_or_backs_up).
Helios responsiveness — the concrete bug that motivated the above: a free
running 1 s QTimer queued a status poll that took ~2 s, so the queue grew
for as long as the panel stayed connected.
- helios_laser._query reads until the CR terminator instead of sleeping a
fixed 0.05 + 0.2 s per query
- one _query_int() helper replaces five copies of parse-with-logging
- polling is now driven by the worker; HeliosWindow's QTimer is gone
- dropped __del__, which disabled the laser and wrote to the serial port
from the garbage collector at an unpredictable time
helios_test_app.py — the worker was moveToThread'd but every call site
invoked its methods directly, so all serial I/O (including the sleeps)
ran on the GUI thread; Query All froze the UI for ~2 s. Calls now go
through a queued signal to a pyqtSlot. Also: connect/disconnect cycles
leaked a QThread + worker + 9 connections each time; 16 copies of the
not-connected guard collapse to _require_connection(); the Query Power
button called a method that has never existed (AttributeError popup) and
is now disabled and documented in KNOWN_ISSUES.
DCBiasImageWidget preallocates its image and uses set_data/set_clim, so
the live preview stops rebuilding the array and the whole artist tree per
row (O(rows^2) over a scan).
bbd20x: connect() now raises when no bays respond instead of reporting
success on the wrong port; disconnect() joins with a timeout so a wedged
reader can't hang shutdown; one _channel_for() helper replaces four
copy-pasted axis mappings; hardcoded travel limits become TRAVEL_MM; the
joke error strings are gone.
gui/widgets.py adds the shared ConnectionBar / PortSelector / bounded
LogConsole / StatusGrid for the test benches to adopt. 65 tests passing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Thomas Ales