THBG004

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URL	https://doi.org/10.18429/JACoW-ICALEPCS2025-THBG004
Title	The Karabo middlelayer API and motion control systems at European XFEL
Authors	D. Hickin, N. Anakkappalla, V. Bondar, R. Costa, W. Ehsan, S. Esenov, R. Fabbri, G. Flucke, A. García-Tabarés Valdivieso, G. Giovanetti, D. Goeries, S. Hauf, I. Karpics, A. Klimovskaia, A. Nasri, A. Parenti, A. Samadli, H. Santos, M. Sharon, F. Sohn, J. Vazquez-Garcia, M. Teichmann European X-Ray Free-Electron Laser
Abstract	Karabo is a device-based distributed control system toolkit used to implement the control and data acquisition systems of European XFEL. A feature of Karabo is its middlelayer (MDL) API - a powerful, flexible and easy-to-use asynchronous Python API which can be used to implement Karabo devices. Such devices may interface hardware directly, or they may communicate with other Karabo devices to provide coordination between them or derive functionality from them. Lightweight middlelayer devices, called macros, allow routines for coordinating or monitoring Karabo devices to be quickly created. A command-line interface using the MDL API is provided by the iKarabo utility. In this contribution an overview of the Karabo middlelayer is given, presenting key parts of the API, and macros and iKarabo are introduced. Examples of MDL devices are presented, with an emphasis on motion systems. A framework for multi-axis motion, virtual motor base, and the scan tool, Karabacon, are described. The Karabo MDL API is compared to EPICS solutions, including pythonSoftIOC and asyn, and to BlueSky.
Paper	download: THBG004.pdf
Cite	BibTeX, LaTeX, Text/Word, RIS, EndNote
Conference	20th Int. Conf. Accel. Large Exp. Phys. Control Syst. (ICALEPCS'25)
Series
Location	Chicago, IL, USA
Date	20-26 Sep 2025
Publisher	JACoW Publishing, Geneva, Switzerland
Editorial Board	Kent Wootton (ANL), Jeffery Biss (FNAL), Gustavo Bruno (ANL), Jeff Kirchman (ANL), Kelly Jaje (ANL), Denise Skiadopoulos (ANL), SuYin Grass Wang (ANL)
Online ISBN	978-3-95450-255-4
Online ISSN	2226-0358
Received	08 September 2025
Revised	26 September 2025
Accepted	28 October 2025
Issued	25 November 2025
DOI	10.18429/JACoW-ICALEPCS2025-THBG004
Pages	1359-1366
Copyright	Published by JACoW Publishing under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s), the published article's title, publisher, and DOI.