Support for Quantum Northwest 3x3 Temperature controller

[FreddieAkeroyd]

As a member of the Sample Environment group/beamline scientist I would like to be able to control the Quantum Northwest NeutroniQ 3x3 from within IBEX in the SE lab/on my beamline

https://www.qnw.com/product/neutroniq-3x3/
(May be this: https://qnw.com/products/neutroniq/)?

Acceptance Criteria

• IOC exists and has been tested with hardware
• OPI exists and has been tested with hardware

Planning

27/08/2025 -00:10:30 good first IOC, agreed to delay to next sprint in favour of rest of workload
Discussed 00:36:00 - in planning 02/10/25

[FreddieAkeroyd]

manual in Manuals\QuantumNorthWest shared folder

[FreddieAkeroyd]

Equipment now onsite

[GRyall]

It is unclear at the moment where this will be used and what the relative priority of this work is (I am working on the latter). In the meantime:

• @FreddieAkeroyd has passed on this message from a collaborator in another lab who has integrated the same device and his own note with it: “You might want to talk to your programming team about an issue we ran into while trying to integrate ours. There are a few asynchronous commands that get sent from the controllers. Most of these commands can be shut off (via RS232/ethernet communication), but errors and faults are the exceptions to this. I'm not sure how well your instrument control software handles asynchronous commands from a device, but ours was terrible at it until the QNW devices arrived.” So stream device does handle asynchronous commands, if they can get inserted in the middle of an expected reply sequence it will be a bit more messy, but if they just appear randomly outside of normal polls that is fine. We probably won’t know until we try.
• @davidkeymer took a look at it in January of 2022 and reported the following:
  • Initial tests went well. I connected a single temperature controller to port 1 on the second MOXA nPort associated with NDXSOFMAT, so COM21, using the supplied cable connected to a male DB9 MOXA cable. I then used Hyperterminal to try communicating, which worked when I configured the connection correctly! 19200,8,n,1 from the manual.
  • Commands seem simple enough using square brackets to enclose them, but strangely the device responds immediately after receiving the closing bracket, so no CRLF required. I tried a few basic ones, including reading firmware, status, etc. and was well. I think we may only need to implement a few, IIRC: “set control mode”, “set target temperature”, “get current temperature”, “get status”. No ramping or other clever functions required and there are no “channels” as all three sample cells are controlled via the same loop.
  • There are six of these temperature controllers in total, and [...] there would only ever be three on a beamline at once, so three IOCs needed (unless six in case).
• He tells me they are now set up and connected using 6 ports of the Moxa box and being controlled with the manufacturer provided software.

[updated Freddie's issue above as well]

[GRyall]

CL reports this is in ACs testing area. Currently using 9 copies of vendor software simultaneously for testing work.