A transporter for data from Diamond eBIC microscope and detector machines onto the Diamond network.

Murfey, the package, is named after Eliza Murfey, the inventor:

Focusing on the mechanics of the railroad, inventor Eliza Murfey created devices designed to improve the bearings on rail wheels. With sixteen patents for her lubrication system, it was Murfey who designed the packings that would lubricate the axles with oil, aiding in the reduction of derailments caused by seized axles and bearings.

We suggest you start with your favourite virtual environment (mamba/conda/python virtualenv/...), then install using the following command.

$ git clone git@github.com:DiamondLightSource/python-murfey.git
$ cd python-murfey
$ pip install -e .[client,server,developer]

The packages included under the [developer] installation key contain some helpful tools to aid you with developing Murfey further:

• ipykernel - Enables interactive code development via Jupyter Notebooks.
• pre-commit - Allows for the installation and running of hooks to help with linting, formatting, and type checking your code.
• pytest - Used in conjunction with test functions to evaluate the reliability of your code.
• bump2version - A nice little script to simplify version control.

Finally, you may want to set up an ISPyB mock database server and a Zocalo development environment. The instructions for this are out of scope here.

You can then start the Murfey server with

$ murfey.server

and connect the client with

$ murfey --server http://127.0.0.1:8000

You can also install a client on a remote machine. This machine only needs to have a minimum Python installation and curl. Open the murfey server website in a browser on the client, and navigate to the bootstrap page. Then copy the displayed commands into a command line terminal.

Murfey consists of two main components, one designed to run on the acquisition system which should have visibility of both the raw data and metadata produced during data acquisition, and another which should have visibility of the location from which the data will be processed and access to any cluster computing resources for processing. There are currently two options for the former corresponding to two choices of UI:

1. In terminal UI using textual
2. In browser UI which requires setting up a React app

For choice 1 Murfey runs as a simple client that communicates with the server and is closed at the end of a data acquisition session. For choice 2 a second server component (referred to as the instrument server) is run on the acquisition system.