Automatic attenuator upgrade for a Siemens D500 diffractometer via a generic software library to overcome hardware limitations

A proxy software was developed which allows the Siemens D500 x-ray diffractometer to be upgraded with add-ons that have never been officially available for it. For demonstration, we designed and integrated an automatic attenuator option and demonstrated the feasibility of our upgrade path by typical comparative x-ray measurements, which would usually saturate the x-ray detector, if no attenuator is used.