The Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS)

"Up to a point, EPICS makes all devices look the same. You can speak a common language to EPICS in the same way you can speak a common language to different websites. It's the equivalent of the 'http' in a web address, but for hardware control." (Dan Allan, NSLS-II). Bluesky stands on the shoulders of EPICS, and provides additional capabilities such as live visualization and data processing tools, and can export data into nearly any file format in real time. Bluesky was developed using "Python," a common programming language that will make Bluesky simple for future scientists to modify, and to implement at new experiments.

The Bluesky software libraries developed and amongst others deployed at NSLS-II and APS facilitate collaboration between experiments, support streaming "on-the-fly" visualization and processing of large datasets, automate metadata capture for use in search queries or analysis, and integrate well with analysis software via the open-source scientific Python ecosystem. This enables scientists to leverage existing python programms at every stage of the experiment from data acquistion through data analysis. Through the integration of our compute cluster, machine learning algorithms can also be used for online optimization. Engagement from a wider user and developer community is beginning and will be actively supported (also with BESSY-II, CatLab and FAIRmat). The project is thoroughly documented (https://blueskyproject.io/) and the code is available under a standard open-source license.