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 \section{The CMDS Instrument}

 

+From an instrumental perspective, MR-CMDS is a problem of calibration and coordination.  %

+Within the Wright Group, each of our two main instruments are composed of roughly ten actively

+moving component hardwares. %

+Many of these components are purchased directly from vendors such as SpectraPhysics, National

+Instruments, Horiba, Thorlabs, and Newport.  %

+Others are created or heavily modified by graduate students.  %

+The Wright Group has always maintained custom acquisition software packages which control the

+complex, many-stepped dance that these components must perform to acquire MR-CMDS spectra.  %

+

 \section{Scientific Software}

 

+When I joined the Wright Group, I saw that acquisition software was a real barrier to experimental

+progress and flexibility.  %

+Graduate students had ideas for instrumental enhancements that were infeasible because of the

+challenge of incorporating the new components into the existing software ecosystem.  %

+At the same time, students were spending much of their time in lab repeatedly calibrating optical

+parametric amplifiers by hand, a process that sometimes took days.  %

+I chose to spend a significant portion of my graduate career focusing on solving these problems

+through software development.  %

+At first, I focused on improving the existing LabVIEW code.  %

+Eventually, I developed a vision for a deeply modular acquisition software that could not be

+practically created with LabVIEW.  %

+Using Python and Qt, I created a brand new acquisition software PyCMDS: built from the ground up to

+fundamentally solve historical challenges in the Group.  %

+PyCMDS offers a modular hardware model that can ``re-configure'' itself to flexibly control a

+variety of component hardware configurations.  %

+This has enabled graduate students to add and remove hardware whenever necessary, without worrying

+about a heavy additional programming burden.  %

+PyCMDS is now used to drive both MR-CMDS instruments in the Group, allowing for easy sharing of

+component hardware and lessening the total amount of software that the Group needs to maintain.  %

+Besides being more flexible, PyCMDS solves a number of other problems.  %

+It offers fully automated strategies for calibrating component hardwares, making calibration less

+arduous and more reproducible.  %

+It offers more fine-grained control of data acquisition and timing, enabling more complex

+algorithms to quickly acquire artifact-free results.  %

+In conjunction with other algorithmic and hardware improvements that I have made, PyCMDS has

+decreased acquisition times by up to two orders of magnitude.  %

+A companion software, WrightTools (which I also created), solves some of the processing and

+representation challenges of multidimensional data.  %
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