Speaker
Description
The Swiss Light Source (SLS) has successfully completed its major upgrade under the SLS 2.0 program, with beamlines now back in user operation. Alongside this hardware renewal, the new Beamline and Experiment Control system (BEC) has been deployed across the facility, providing a unified solution for beamline control. BEC addresses long-standing challenges of fragmented interfaces as well as limited collaboration and re-use, offering a flexible client–server architecture based on Redis and modular services.
The BEC ecosystem encompasses several complementary components. BEC Widgets, a graphical interface framework built on PySide6/Qt6, is becoming the main entry point for beamline scientists, providing customizable and reusable tools for graphical experiment control. Deployment across a diverse set of beamlines is managed using Ansible, with beamline-specific plugins ensuring flexibility and maintainability. Looking ahead, BEC Atlas is under development to provide centralized access to the metadata database and access-control management. It will also serve as the entry point for remote operation.
This talk will present the BEC architecture, its ecosystem of components, and the strategy that enabled a smooth rollout and successful operation of BEC during the SLS 2.0 comeback, along with an outlook on upcoming developments.
