Getting Started

The Purpose of Dodal

dodal provides set of ophyd devices and bluesky plans that are commonly useful across many beamlines at DLS.

If you have some code that you think would be useful to be added please do so!

Using Devices

dodal contains devices to cover anything you would like to do using a beamline’s hardware.

To use these devices you can do the following:

from dodal.beamlines import i03
dcm = i03.dcm()
# You can now use the DCM as you would any other device in Bluesky plans

If you are on a beamline workstation this will give you immediate access to the real hardware. If you are not on a beamline workstation it will default to connecting to a simulated instrument.

Adding Logging

dodal provides some helper functions to help you log what’s going on.

You can set these up using:

from dodal.beamlines import i03
from dodal.log import set_up_logging_handlers, LOGGER

set_up_logging_handlers()

Some logging will now occur when you are using devices/plans, you can increase the amount of logs by instead using set_up_logging_handlers("DEBUG"). You can also log more explicitly using:

LOGGER.info("I am a log message")

If you are on a beamline workstation this will save any logs to dls_sw/BEAMLINE/logs/bluesky/ and will push them to graylog. If you are not on a beamline workstation logs will be saved next to your working directory and pushed to a local graylog instance.

If you would like to only log to graylog/file exlusively there are helper functions in dodal.log that you can use.