Usage

The bluesky-speadsheet library provides an object that behaves like any bluesky plan but obtains its instructions by interpreting an Excel spreadsheet.

To set it up initially, you must provide a standard bluesky plan that knows how to interpret a row of the spreadsheet.

In the first example, suppose we have a spreadsheet with two columns:

• position — desired position of a motor during an exposure

• number — number of exposures

This example will generate a count() for each row in the spreadsheet.

import bluesky.plans
import bluesky.plan_stubs
import bluesky_spreadsheet
from ophyd.sim import det, motor  # simulated hardware for this example

def plan(detectors, row):
    yield from bluesky.plan_stubs.mv(motor, row['position'])
    yield from bluesky.plans.count([det], int(row['number']))

spreadsheet = ExcelSpreadsheet('path/to/spreadsheet.xlsx', plan)

The spreadsheet object is itself a plan, and can be passed to the RunEngine for execution:

from bluesky import RunEngine

RE = RunEngine()
RE(spreadsheet())

The spreadsheet is re-read between each row. Any edits or additionals made (and saved) to during execution to rows that have not yet been reached will be respected. If execution is interrupted, the spreadsheet object keeps track of where it left off and will resume from the last row that it did not complete. To resume from a specific row use

RE(spreadsheet(start_at=SOME_ROW_NUMBER))

Important

Notice in the example above that the number of exposures row['numbers'] is explicit converted to an integer as int(row['numbers']). Excel stores all numerical data as floating point, so any values that are actually expected to be integers will need to be converted.