Statement of need¶

Scientific data acquisition often involves controlling a variety of hardware devices, coordinating measurements, and managing the resulting data and metadata. While the Bluesky ecosystem provides a powerful hardware abstraction layer and data model, building a complete application that integrates these capabilities into a usable interface remains a non-trivial task.

redsun aims to address this gap by providing a modular, event-driven framework for constructing scientific data acquisition applications.

graph TD
    redsun -->|provides SDK for| components
    components -->|loaded by| redsun
    redsun -->|assembles| application

The role of each part¶

• Redsun provides both the application container and the SDK — shared base classes and communication patterns (devices, presenters, views, a shared container for inter-component communication and data exchange) — ensuring a consistent programming model across the entire ecosystem.
• Components are user-developed packages that implement the actual hardware drivers, business logic, and UI components using the redsun SDK.
• redsun is the application shell that discovers plugins, wires them together through its container architecture, and launches the final application.

Design philosophy¶

redsun follows three guiding principles:

1. Don't reinvent the wheel - leverage existing tools like Bluesky's hardware protocols and Qt's UI framework. Instead of building everything from scratch, ship the tools to build the wheel.
2. Be modular - users should be able to pick only the components they need. A plugin providing a motor controller should work independently of one providing a camera interface.
3. Give users control - users own their data and metadata. The framework provides the structure but does not impose constraints on what data means or how it should be organized.

Why not just use Bluesky directly?¶

Bluesky was originally designed with an interactive approach in mind, in the sense that the user would directly control the RunEngine execution via a command-line interface or via IPython. This is imperative for the context in which Bluesky was developed (large experimental setups with multiple hardware devices connected to a central control system such as EPICS and Tango).

What redsun provides on top of Bluesky is a more lab-bench experience, for setups that are meant to be controlled via a Graphical User Interface similar to Micro-Manager.