
The Coude Echelle Spectrographs (Expert Information)
Appendix C9: UCLES and ADAM
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The UCLES data acquisition system is written in the ADAM environment (on
the VAX). It consists of the following main components:
-
A user interface based on the ADAM Interactive Command Language or ICL
(most user commands are simple ICL procedures)
-
An ADAM D-task that is responsible for the instrument itself (this task
alone talks directly to the spectrograph)
-
An ADAM A-task monolith that contains various utility programs that do
not require interaction with the instrument, such as CENTRE (the program
that calculates the instrument configuration necessary to centre a specified
wavelength on the detector) and LIST (the program that lists the contents
of the current control file)
-
An ADAM C-task monolith that contains various utility programs that do
require interaction with the instrument, such as OFFSETS (the program that
sets echelle angle offsets) and ROTCEN (the program that calculates slit
and echelle angle offsets)
-
An ADAM CD-task that contains utility programs that have a particularly
close relationship with the D-task, such as CONFIGURE (the program that
reads the output from CENTRE or MANUAL and configures the spectrograph)
and DISPLAY (the program that reads and displays the spectrograph status).
The same program is also responsible for controlling observations (it coordinates
the spectrograph D-task and the detector D-task) and for handling continuous
actions like controlling the rotator angle to keep the slit vertical or
at a specified angle on the sky
-
An ADAM A-task that consists solely of the ECHWIND program. This is kept
separate so as to make it easy to provide the same version both from within
the data acquisition system and from DCL. Note that there is now a unix
version of ECHWIND which is the recommended version.
Ray Stathakis (ras@aaoepp.aao.gov.au)
Last Update: 17 April 2000