Bruker nanostar

Lurking in the basement of Reading's chemistry department is  a shiny new Bruker Nanostar instrument. In the dim, distant past when I wasn't indoctrinated with science, I remember the main association with x-rays was ray-gunning people and looking at your skeleton. Well, these days I sagely realise there's a lot more that can be done with them. In particular, the Nanostar instrument will measure what is known in the trade as small angle x-ray scattering (SAXS). I won't go through the details, but essentially the principle is that you can measure really small things with really small wavelengths. This means potentially structures of protein crystals and, in my case, structures of water channels a few nanometres thick. 

So, how have I got on with the instrument? My assessment is basically: hardware good, software bad. We have a detector of a type which will take a full x-ray beam without being burned to smithereens, unlike the old style of detectors. I hear it's not quite as good a resolution as some of the other state of the art detectors, but it's easily good enough for the applications we've put it to so far. Everything seems pretty sturdy. Shortening the sample-detector distance is time-consuming I'll grant, but not difficult. We're probably exceptional in needing that fairly routinely and I've got it down to about 45 minutes to do the swap-over. 

My issues come when you start to use the software. It simply isn't intuitive. A simple example: to make the simplest kind of measurement requires going into the menu 'collect', selecting the submenu 'scan' and then choosing one of the following options: 'add', 'single run' or 'multi-run' (among other options). Can you tell me why any of those menu names would be the most obvious choice? No, thought not. Also, reading this I'm sure you have no idea what any of those three options do. It transpires that the easiest way to run several samples in different positions is 'single run'. I still haven't worked out what 'multi-run' does. 

There is a scripting language, with which you can put in commands (garnered from a log file or 'Help - Errata', obviously) and get the instrument to do more or less what you want. The whole thing smacks of software written by programmers who don't understand the capability of your average bench-top chemist. The prospect of writing a program is a pretty daunting one for most of our users. In my case, using grazing incidence, it is the only option since there is no standard measurement routine that controls sample angle. 

At the end of the day, we are happy with the results we have (lots of pretty spots and so on) but for an instrument with the capability and cost of the Nanostar, I am very disappointed with the standard of the software. I don't buy the argument that extra capability makes the software necessarily difficult to handle. There's already two pieces of software for simple and advanced control to stop stupid people messing things up. The simple one just isn't simple enough and feels like it was written in a rush by someone who has never run an x-ray scattering pattern.