An embeddable control system for astronomical instrumentation

Roberto Cirami; Maurizio Comari; Claudio Corte; Damjan Golob; Paolo Di Marcantonio; Mark Plesko; Mauro Pucillo; Paolo Santin; Matej Sekoranja; Claudio Vuerli

doi:10.1117/12.550032

15 September 2004 An embeddable control system for astronomical instrumentation

Roberto Cirami, Maurizio Comari, Claudio Corte, Damjan Golob, Paolo Di Marcantonio, Mark Plesko, Mauro Pucillo, Paolo Santin, Matej Sekoranja, Claudio Vuerli

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 5496, Advanced Software, Control, and Communication Systems for Astronomy; (2004) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.550032
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2004, Glasgow, United Kingdom

Abstract

Large experimental facilities, like telescopes and focal plane instrumentation in the astronomical domain, are becoming more and more complex and expensive, as well as control systems for managing such instruments. The general trend, as can be learned by realizations carried out in the most recent years, clearly drives to most cost-effective solutions: widespread, stable standards in the software field, COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) components and industry standards in the hardware field. Therefore a new generation of control system products needs to be developed, in order to help the scientific community to minimize the cost and efforts required for maintenance and control of their facilities. In the spirit of the aforementioned requirements and to provide a low-cost software and hardware environment we present a working prototype of a control system, based on RTAI Linux and on ACS (Advanced Control System) framework ported to an embedded platform. The hardware has been chosen among COTS components: a PC/104+ platform equipped with a PMAC2A motion controller card and a commercial StrongARM single board controller. In this way we achieved a very powerful, inexpensive and robust real-time control system which can be used as a general purpose building block in the design of new instruments and could also be proposed as a standard in the field.

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Roberto Cirami, Maurizio Comari, Claudio Corte, Damjan Golob, Paolo Di Marcantonio, Mark Plesko, Mauro Pucillo, Paolo Santin, Matej Sekoranja, and Claudio Vuerli "An embeddable control system for astronomical instrumentation", Proc. SPIE 5496, Advanced Software, Control, and Communication Systems for Astronomy, (15 September 2004); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.550032

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