Life at the NSLS:
There is a nice (and very complete) description of
almost everything you might need to know about how to get along on
Long Island and at BNL, provided courtesy of the BNL Public Affairs
group.
All people who do work at BNL must have an "appointment" with
the Lab. This will be a "guest" appointment and you will arrange
it through the NSLS Users' Administration office. If you are
not a US citizen, the process may be more complicated than if you are. The
Biology Department User Coordinator's name, phone number, and
E-mail address can be found on the front page of beamline documentation if
you need forms or advice.
A second item of business is your Experimental Safety Form.
You will already have given us information about the safety aspects
of your experiment in the application form. The Biology Dept. User
Coordinator will help you to submit a form; please be sure it's
done in advance.
You can make your own arrangements in advance for housing with the BNL housing office (phone number: 631 344 2541). They're pretty convenient and inexpensive; they can be paid for with a credit card. You have
a responsibility, once reservations have been made, to use them or
cancel them. If you fail to cancel unused reservations, you'll
have to pay.
Visitors are strongly encouraged to arrive for their
visit to the NSLS early enough to spend some time checking crystals,
getting training, assuring that all tools are in place, etc.
An arrival at the lab of 3 PM or so will allow time to obtain help if
necessary from the beamline technician before he goes home, and to get
the NSLS
training completed.
After your arrival at BNL you should go to the NSLS Users'
Administration office to register. To find this office, enter the
front door of the NSLS and climb the stairway behind the doorway to
the left. After filling out various registration forms, you'll get a
film badge and be instructed to watch a video tape about safety. We
reiterate from above that we encourage you to come
early. You could be taking data by 9 AM if you plan ahead.
At any hour of the day or night you can obtain your safety training
through the personnel in the NSLS control room. They will give you a
blue card-key that will admit you to the
experimental floor. In the worst case after an early arrival one
will have time and materials to make preparations or repairs that
might have wasted hours of beamtime the next day. In the best case,
one can go to the beach. Note: You do not need to
register at the NSLS users office to begin your experiment if you have
the safety training! The registration can be performed at leisure
during the first day of running. Come straight to the beamline on the
first morning.
Things that typically go wrong include having freezing loops
mounted at the wrong height, having some crystals die so others need
to be soaked, or not having the right goniometer-head key.
We remind users that the principal factor that contributes to lost
beam time is crystals that degrade during transportation to BNL. Take
very seriously the question of how best to transport the
specimens. We recommend that you decide on a plan, prepare some
crystals that way, drive them around in your car for a day, then see
if they still diffract.
We have our own laboratory right at the beamline. You may
manipulate specimens, think quietly, or do computing there (there's a PC). There is a coldroom nearby in the building
for your use. You may have food at the beamline, but please
take no food into the laboratory -- we're on shaky ground
with the safety committee as it is. There is a key for the
laboratory; ask where it is and keep it locked when you leave for an
extended period.
The color TV monitor at the beamline tells you things about the
operation the ring. Channel 9, the most useful channel, has a
continuous message regarding the status of the x-ray ring. It's Red
during injection, Green during ramping, and Blue during operation.
You can read the present current and the 1/e lifetime, as well as some
messages about operation. When calamities occur, up-to-date
information about repairs to the synchrotron can often be found on
channel 2. Channel 11 carries the weekly schedule
for ring operations.
At the end of your visit, before you leave BNL, please
submit an end-of-run form.
It's also crucial to the continued funding of the facility
that you submit an abstract
describing your result when we request them (typically once a year).
Go Back To Table Of Contents (TOP)
Summary of data-collection procedures
Written by Ruiming Xu and Margaret O'Gara
START UP THE SOFTWARE:
Operation and troubleshooting of the data collection software
depends on the detector (B4,B1) being used.
B4 software summary
This is intended as a summary of the critical software aspects of the
B4 detector. More details concerning the B4
are available.
The detector actually is made up of a 2x2 array of 1K CCD
detectors. Each detector is controlled by a PC running Linux. Their
nodenames are lsx12i, lsx12j, lsx12k, and lsx12l. On one of the
beamline computer monitors should be four shell windows, each of which
is a telnet session to one of the PCs. The username for the PCs is
"det", we will give you the password. The only thing that should be
run on the PCs is a progam called "server". After starting "server"
and seeing some information scroll by, the program should wait with
"Accepting service request". At that point the data collection program
"CBASS" can be started.
B1 software summary
The single-celled CCD detector is controlled by a Windows PC that
starts up the detector-control software at boot time. Users almost
never need to touch this computer. More 
*A good, quick rule of thumb when using Hampton pins is that a pin broken off on the second "notch" will be about the right height to fit on our machines.
