[en] At any synchrotron facility, motors are numerous: they are the significant actuators of accelerators and the main actuators of beamlines. Since 2003, the Electronic Control and data Acquisition group at SOLEIL has defined a modular and reliable motion architecture integrating industrial products (Galil controller, Midi-Engineering and Phytron power boards). Simultaneously, the software control group has developed a set of dedicated Tango devices. At present, more than 1000 motors and 200 motion controller crates are in operation at SOLEIL. Aware that motion control is important in improving performance, given that the positioning of optical systems and samples is a key element of any beamline, SOLEIL wants to upgrade its motion controller in order to maintain the facility at a high performance level and be able to respond to new requirements: better accuracy, complex trajectory and coupling multi-axis devices such as hexa-pods. This project is called REVOLUTION (Reconsider Various controllers for your motion). (authors)

[en] Attenuators are commonly used on beamlines to control incident photon flux. Attenuators are mainly controlled by software. In some experimental cases using various diffraction techniques, this architecture is not fast enough to manage high flux variation. The fast attenuation system inserts and extracts filters quickly, allowing very fast beam attenuation at the maximum rate allowed by the filter mechanism and the beam detector response. To build the solution, we used an off-the-shelf CPCI General Purpose board (GPIO) from TEWS that is based on a SPARTAN-3 Xilinx FPGA: We have developed a daughter board and an embedded VHDL program. The logic is dedicated to maintaining incident detector photon flux within an acceptable range for optimized measurements and protecting the X ray detector against over-exposure. This system is part of a continuous scan process. Some low level process logic is also embedded in order to optimize data exchange. During continuous scanning, this process allows each experimental data item collected to be associated with its corresponding photon flux value. This system is in operation on the SIXS beamline and will be soon installed on the DIFFABS beamline. This paper describes the principle and the results obtained with this solution and the possible improvements and perspectives (interfacing more complex detectors such as XPad).