23.1. VMXi Introduction¶
23.1.1. An overview of VMXi¶
The Versatile Macromolecular X-tallography in-situ (VMXi) beamline is I02-2. 1
VMXi marks a major operational change in the way MX experiments on a beamline are conducted. The beamline control is highly automated, dedicated to continuously processing user samples, uninterrupted for days at a time. All experiments are in situ, with hundreds of plates stored in storage units (plate hotel/Formulatrix) housed next to the beamline endstation, waiting to be processed.
The beamline has two plate hotels (total capacity ~2000 plates), one unit operating at 20 degrees and one at 4 degrees Celsius. Each plate is divided into 192 wells, one drop/well in which crystals grow. Users select crystals in wells to request data collections using the SynchWeb interface. Samples in the drop are shot with X-Rays and diffraction data is recorded to ISPyB.
An overview of the beamline is shown below.
The picture below shows the External Robot Enclosure and Endstation Enclosure.
VMXi operation and code is divided into two parts:
Sample handling responsible for moving plates via robot actions
Data collection responsible for data collection at the endstation.
The processes of each are independent and hence allows plates to move between the plate hotels and Local Storage (inside Endstation Enclosure) while data collection is running. To accomplish this depends upon a strict contract to prevent plate unloaded during data collection. See the corresponding sub-sections of this document for details.
Outside of these contexts other code is documented in Control Objects.
The VMXi GDA code is located in the Gerrit project gda/gda-mx
(see
Gerrit gda/gda-mx).
See section GDA Installation of this document for more information regarding development workspace provisioning.
1: I02-1 is the VMXm micro/nanofocus MX beamline.