JBluIce-EPICS: a fast and flexible open-source beamline control system for macromolecular crystallography

This paper overviews recent advances in the JBluIce-EPICS open-source control system designed at the macromolecular crystallography beamlines of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and National Cancer Institute at the Advanced Photon Source (GM/CA-APS). We discuss some technical highlights of this system distinguishing it from the competition, such as reduction of software layers to only two, possibility to operate JBluIce in parallel with other beamline controls, plugin-enabled architecture where the plugins can be written in any programming language, and utilization of the whole power of the Java integrated development environment in the Graphical User Interface. Then, we demonstrate how these highlights help to make JBluIce fast, easily adaptable to new beamline developments, and intuitive for users. In particular, we discuss several recent additions to the system including a bridge between crystal rastering and data collection, automatic detection of raster polygons from optical crystal centering, background data processing, and a pathway to a fully automated pipeline from crystal screening to solving crystal structure.