MX - A Data Acquisition and Control System

MX is a data acquisition and control system that is designed to serve several functions:

As a portable toolkit for writing data acquisition and control programs.
As a standalone system capable of controlling entire experiments.
As a platform for building device control servers to be used by other applications.
As a way of extending other control systems and of glueing disparate control systems together.

MX is currently available for Linux, Microsoft Windows (Win32 or Cygwin), MacOS X, Solaris, Irix, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, HP/UX, QNX, RTEMS, VxWorks, Tru64, VMS, and MSDOS (DJGPP).

MX has been developed primarily for use in the X-ray and synchrotron radiation field, but may be useful for other types of experiments. The primary developer is William Lavender of the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Downloads

MX is available as open source under an MIT X11 style license. Source code for the various MX related packages can be downloaded from here.
The Subversion repositories for MX can be found here.

MX Mailing List

You may subscribe to a moderated mailing list for MX announcements here. Generally there is one message every few months when a new version of MX is released.
The list archive can be found here.

MX Documentation

Publications About MX

W. M. Lavender, MX: A Beamline Control System Toolkit, Synchrotron Radiation Instrumentation: Eleventh US National Conference, AIP Conf. Proc. 521, 332 (2000).
W. M. Lavender, MX at the Advanced Photon Source, Advanced Photon Source User Activity Report (2000).

Presentations About MX

My posters for the NOBUGS 2006 meeting. (OpenOffice.org format) (exported to PowerPoint format)
My presentation and paper for the NOBUGS 2004 meeting at the Paul Scherrer Institut (Swiss Light Source) in October 2004.
My presentation and paper for the NOBUGS 2002 meeting at NIST in November 2002.
My presentation about MX at SSRL in February 2001. (StarOffice 5 format) (exported to PowerPoint)
My presentation and posters about MX from the NOBUGS 2000 meeting at Daresbury in June 2000.
Slides about MX from an APS Technical Working Group (TWG) meeting in June 1999.
Rationale, Drivers, Examples,
Slides about an earlier version of MX from the December 1997 NOBUGS conference at Argonne.
Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Meeting Notes

Application Program Documentation

Motor - A command line based program for motor control and data acquisition.
- A summary of motor's commands is available.

If you find MX to be useful, I would be interested in hearing how you have used it. My email address is lavender@agni.phys.iit.edu.

Last modified by lavender@agni.phys.iit.edu on January 13, 2021.