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ESPaDOnS: control software and user interface http://webast.ast.obs-mip.fr/magnetisme/espadons_new/control.html
ESPaDOnS
control software and user interface
Control software
Instrument control is operated through the cfht ’director’ environment. Within this environment, line commands are typed and
dispatched to the four agents, each controlling one specific instrument module.
The cassegrain agent controls the cassegrain module and
associated motions, lamps and sensors. This includes in
particular moving the atmospheric dispersion corrector prisms
(commands adc, adc1 and adc2), the calibration wheel
(command calibwh), the guider density wheel (command
denswh), the halfwave rhombs (commands rhomb1 and
rhomb2), the wollaston slide (command wedwol) and the
fabry-perot wheel (command fabpero). It also involves
switching on and off the flat field and thorium lamps in the
calibration box and tuning their fluxes (commands flat, thor,
fluxred, fluxblue) and reading the two temperature sensors
(commands temppol and tempcb). It can also display the status
of the cassegrain unit, as shown in the image on the right.
The spectrograph agent controls the spectrograph unit and
associated motors, lamps and sensors. In particular, it operates
the camera drive and hartmann mask for focussing the
spectrograph (commands camfocus and hartmann), the slicer
rotation and associated motions for setting the spectrograph
configuration (commands slicer, bench and dekker) and the
slicer lamp drive (only used for alignment purposes, command
lamp). It can also set the slicer lamp on or off (command halogen), put the exposure meter on or off (command expometer),
open or close the exposure meter shutter (command exposhutter), read the 4 temperature, the pressure and hygrometer sensors
(commands tmp1, tmp2, tmp3, tmp4, pressure, hygrometry) and launch the associated graphical tools (commands hskgui for
displaying the sensors values and apdgui for displaying the exposure meter graphs).
The guider agent operates the guiding camera and offers all usual functionalities, among which acquiring and displaying images
from the guiding camera (commands acquire and visu), changing the position and size of the image (command winsize),
updating the zone on which guiding is active (command gzone), computing the relative position of the guiding star with respect
to the centre of the guiding zone and send corrections to the telescope control system (command autoguide). It also provides the
observer with a number of byproducts, like for instance a graphical window displaying the magnitude and width of the guiding
star as a function of time (command gapgui).
The detcom agent operates the main ccd detector as well as the spectrograph shutter. It offers the observer all usual explosure
handling utilities, like setting the exposure type and time (commands etype and etime), running exposures (command go) and
checking the ccd temperature (command temp).
Individual commands can be chained within shell scripts to automatically run series of operations that require a large number
of low level tasks. With such scripts, observing sessions can be automated quite easily, provided adequate procedures have been
designed for the program being carried out.
Graphical user interface
The alternate option for operating the instrument is the graphical user interface. It essentially consists in a graphical interface
with buttons, checkboxes and popup menus offering all commands mentioned above with a much more intuitive approach.
While checkboxes and popup menus set up parameters, buttons run scripts executing sequences of individual commands that
depend on the selected options.
The design of the graphical user interface is finished and is presentely being implemented at cfht.
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