2026-01-08.md

areaDetector Collaboration Meeting (2026-01-08)

Attendance

• Érico Nogueira Rolim
• Gustavo de Souza dos Reis
• Henrique Simões
• QunZhang
• Jure Varlec
• Mark Rivers
• Xiaoqiang Wang
• Kishan Govind

Meta-issues

• Retrospective: What are your thoughts on how the meetings have been going?
  • Format, usefulness, efficiency
  • Mark: have a presentation from someone every meeting (new detectors, developments)
• How can we improve engagement of developers and maintainers? How can we encourage folks to attend meetings?
  • Meeting agenda hasn't been posted with 1 week advance, that should be fixed
  • What's missing for more people to interact in general issues?
• We should review the maintainer list. What to do for those who still haven't responded?
  • Mark: add recent contributors as maintainers for some of them, such as Kaz do ADMythen
  • Xiaoqiang: remove from ADMythen
• Do we have long-term roadmaps? Maybe revisit milestones?
  • Mark: there are wishlist items (e.g. refactors to use smart pointers), but they will take time, skill, and require thought towards updating drivers/plugins as well
    • Jure: does the single NDArrayPool cause issues with attribute list reuse? Would be interesting to benchmark effect of allocating for every frame
  • Jure (February Codeathon): destructible areaDetector drivers
    • Implement support in ADCore
    • Implement support in ADAravis
• The items below have yet to be discussed
• Documentation gaps (issue tracking effort):
  • Driver documentation
  • Design decision documentation
• Development and code standards:
  • It would allow us to have a document to point out to contributors
  • Is there interest in this?
  • Suggestions:
    • Using commit messages to document development choices
    • Avoid inclusion of commented out code
    • Prefer modern C++ practices (?)
• Rules/procedures for taking care of the org:
  • Technical disagreements, how to solve?
    • Each maintainer has the last word for their drivers; or
    • External consensus can override that, and certain standards/designs have to be followed
  • Situations where merging without maintainer approval is fine

Issues

• ADCore:
  • Issues:
    • NDPluginPvxs does not use the correct ScalerType enum when for the codec.parameters value when sending compressed NDArrays
    • NDPluginPxvs does not work with ImageJ when ColorMode != 0
    • NDPluginPvxs modifies NDAttributes of NDArrays when copying to pvaDriver
    • too few arguments herr_t H5Oget_info_by_name3
    • NDPluginPvxs does not work with CSS/Phoebus with compressed images
    • Strange INP field to record named "test"
    • github actions build failing on windows-x64
    • Create mixer plugin
  • PRs:
    • use HDF5 API circa 1.10
• ADAravis:
  • PRs:
    • Re-ordered includes in the main configure/RELEASE
• ADEiger:
  • Issues:
    • Problems with Internal Enable mode
    • Problems with using Stream2 interface with more than 1 threshold and not decompressing data in the driver
  • PRs:
    • Internal enable fix
    • Stream2 fix
• ADLightField:
  • PRs:
    • Add setlocal, update PATH with LIGHTFIELD_ROOT
• ADMythen:
  • PRs:
    • Updates/fixes to the driver, works at NSLS2
• ADURL:
  • PRs:
    • Build ADURL with ci-scripts on Ubuntu using out GitLab server.
• Stale Items:
  • Stale Issues:
    • NDFileNexus problem
    • Add flag to prevent overwriting files in NDPluginFile
    • Move more functionality into the ADDriver base class
    • Possible changes to NDArray and NDArrayPool
    • NDArrayPool refactor
    • File writing modes: proposed changes for R3-0.
  • Stale PRs:
    • base frame time stamp on epicsTS
    • base frame timestamp off epicsTS
    • base frame timestamp off epicsTS
    • base frame timestamp off epicsTS
    • base frame timestamp off epicsTS
    • base frame timestamp off epicsTS
    • base frame timestamp off epicsTS

Ongoing development

• github actions build failing on windows-x64
• Fixing incompatible pointer assignment that causes build on RHEL 10 to fail
• Camera on Windows, ImageJ PVA plugin on same machine, gets really slow (1 FPS), no issue with CA or different machines
• Stale Items:
  • Find a way to stop misbehaving plugins from slowing down driver
    • 2025-05-08: close after documenting expected plugin behavior
  • documentation
    • 2025-08-07: Jakub is setting one up, can look at docs
    • No time to take a look at it yet