Iterative development of the generic continuous scans in Sardana

Sardana is a software suite for Supervision, Control and Data Acquisition in scientific installations. It aims to reduce cost and time of design, development and support of the control and data acquisition systems. Sardana is used in several synchrotrons where continuous scans are the desired way of executing experiments. Most experiments require an extensive and coordinated control of many aspects like positioning, data acquisition, synchronization and storage. Many successful ad-hoc solutions have already been developed, however they lack generalization and are hard to maintain or reuse. Sardana, thanks to the Taurus based applications, allows the users to configure and control the scan experiments. The MacroServer, a flexible Python based sequencer, provides parametrizable turn-key scan procedures. Thanks to the Device Pool controllers interfaces, heterogeneous hardware can be easily plug into Sardana and their elements used during scans and data acquisitions. Development of the continuous scans is an ongoing iterative process and its current status is described in this paper. (author)