UCLES and ADAM

As mentioned earlier, the UCLES data acquisition system is written in the ADAM environment. At present 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