Using Panels¶

Lightfall’s interface is built from dockable panels. Panels can be opened and closed independently, rearranged, stacked into tabs, or floated as separate windows. This page explains the docking system and describes each built-in panel.

Managing panels¶

Opening panels¶

• Click a sidebar icon. Each panel has an icon in the vertical strip on the left edge of the window; click to toggle the panel, hover for its name. Icons in the strip’s upper section open panels docked on the left; icons in the lower section open panels docked along the bottom. Icons can be dragged to reorder, including between sections.

• View → Panels. All panels available to your role, grouped by category.

Panels you lack permission for (based on your role) do not appear in either place.

🖼️ Image placeholder — Screenshot: the icon sidebar with a tooltip visible, next to the View → Panels menu open

Rearranging panels¶

• Move: drag a panel’s title bar to a new dock position

• Tab: drop a panel onto another to stack them as tabs

• Float: drag a panel out of the main window

• Resize: drag the borders between panels

Your layout (dock positions, open panels, window geometry) is saved automatically when you quit and restored on the next launch.

Panel reference¶

Plugins can add further panels; agent-built user panels appear under the User category (see Customizing Lightfall with the Agent).

Bluesky¶

Purpose: select, configure, and run data acquisition plans.

The Plans tab lists every registered plan with search and category filtering. Selecting a plan opens a Config tab where each parameter gets an appropriate input — device dropdowns for motors and detectors, numeric fields with units and limits — plus Run, Reset, and Edit buttons. Title-bar buttons create a New Plan, Refresh user plans from disk, and open the user plans folder.

See Running Plans for the full workflow.

Devices¶

Purpose: browse and control hardware.

Two permanent tabs:

• Favorites — devices you have starred (right-click a device in the tree to toggle). Favorites persist per user.

• All — the full device tree from every enabled backend, with search and kind filtering.

Double-clicking a device opens a controller tab with live readbacks and the appropriate control widget — for a motor: setpoint entry with Go, relative-motion tweak buttons, STOP, and status flags. Devices without a matching controller show a read-only message.

Logbook and Entries¶

Purpose: the running record of your experiment.

The Logbook panel (center, always open) shows the current entry as a sequence of fragments — your Markdown notes, images, and automatic records of plans and device changes. The Entries panel is the sidebar list for switching between entries, creating new ones (＋ New Entry), and sorting.

See Using the Logbook.

Claude Assistant¶

Purpose: the embedded agent — help, natural-language control, and building new panels and plans.

Chat interface with a Send button and a broom button to reset the conversation. Requires Claude credentials (see Claude Assistant).

Data Browser¶

Purpose: find runs in the Tiled data catalog.

Filter by date range, plan name, and exit status; results are paginated. Double-click a run to open it in the Visualization panel. Right-click for Copy UUID, Copy Scan ID, Show Visualization, Show Documents, Run pipeline…, and Export.

Requires a Tiled server configured in File → Settings → Tiled Data Catalog; the status line at the bottom of the panel shows the connection state.

Visualization¶

Purpose: plot run data, live or post-hoc.

Given a run (from a Data Browser double-click, or from the assistant), the panel picks the best matching visualization — 1D line plot, heatmap, image stack, scatter, or table — and provides stream/field/type selectors, an optional fitting side panel, and data export. Runs that are still acquiring refresh automatically every two seconds.

Documents¶

Purpose: inspect the raw Bluesky document stream (start, descriptor, event, stop) during acquisition. Useful for debugging metadata and data-flow issues.

IPython Console¶

Purpose: an interactive Python REPL inside the application, with application objects pre-loaded for scripting and debugging.

Logging¶

Purpose: live application log with level filtering (DEBUG through ERROR) and search. The first place to look when something misbehaves.

Synoptic¶

Purpose: a 2D schematic of the beamline hardware layout. Selecting a device in the Devices panel highlights it here.

Queue¶

Purpose: view and manage the RunEngine’s pending plan queue and recent execution history.

Threads¶

Purpose: monitor background threads and async tasks. A developer tool for diagnosing hangs.