Real-time Software

September 22, 2009 GONG H-alpha Review 2

Outline

• Platform

• Development Tools

• Applications

• Analysis

• Summary

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Platform

• CentOS version 5.3 – Equivalent to Red Hat Enterprise but FREE– Easy to Install and Apply Updates– Chose GNOME Desktop for ease of GTK

support– Caveats:

• Had to use 32-bit NON-PAE (Physical Address Extensions) version of CentOS due to Camera’s limited Linux driver support.

• 64-bit versions of the drivers are “on their way”

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Platform - continued

• Drivers…– Model 4000AM-CL DVC (Digital Video Co.)

Camera plus EDT (Engineering Design Team) Pro Camera-Link interface card drivers

• Good set of examples for using camera interface

• Decent technical support

– Model TSYNC PCIe Precision Timing Board drivers

• Rich support for various Operating Systems

• Ease of interfacing to driver

• Great, proactive, technical support

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Development Tools

• Eclipse Galileo Version (v3.5) Integrated Development Environment (IDE)– Subversive v2.0 Plug-in

• GTK+ version 2.12

• IRAF version 2.14

• SAO Image / DS9

• Subversion 1.4.0 (version control software)

• GCC v4.1.2

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Development Tools - cont’d

• OpenJPEG v1.3 (JPEG 2000 open source)– Created JPACK / JUNPACK (FITS to J2K)

• CFITSIO (FITS file support)

• TCL/TK v8.4– BLT v2.4z (Graphical TK widgets)

• GLADE v2.12.1 (Window Prototyping)

• RSYNC v2.6.8 (Secured File Transfers)– 1024-bit encryption

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Applications

• Design considerations...– Targets an Object Oriented approach:

• Applications compiled as C++ executables• Provide wrappers around C - based Camera

and Timing Board driver functions

– Shared Memory and Inter-Process Communication (IPC) for future enhancements (i.e. Real-Time Linux).

– GUI based interface (CamVIEW) for Preventative Maintenance Team Support.

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Applications - cont’d

• H Suite…– The Core set of applications/tasks:

• Frame Grabber (haCamera)– Communicates w/ DVC Camera

• Clock Task (haClock)– Generates Interrupt Based Signal for Camera Snapshot

• Image Processor (haProcessImage)– Dark, Flat-Field, Normalize, Compress, SSH Image

• Instrument State (haInstComm)– TCL/TK communication to query Instrument Computer

– CamVIEW (in-house developed package)• Graphical Management Utility

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Analysis• Compression

– Analyzed various compression techniques, so far the front-runner being JPEG 2000 (next being FPACK)

• Created custom utilities (JPACK/JUNPACK)

– Best compression is 1.5Mbytes w/ noise of ~6 ADU (Analog to Digital Units) which is better than the camera noise.

• Timing– System at Tucson Farm takes ~ 7 seconds of

processing before pushing the image to DMAC• 2 seconds for Image Capture + 2 seconds for Darks/Flats

+ 3 seconds for Compression.

September 22, 2009 GONG H-alpha Review 14

Summary

• Status...– One remaining issue is finding an adequate tradeoff between compression

scheme versus bandwidth requirements.

– Overall development environment stable with minimal issues. The hard part of finding the right combo of O.S., drivers, and hardware is now behind us.

• Future Plans...– 64-Bit Operating System upgrade

• Depends upon Camera and Clock Driver availability from vendors.

– Real-Time Linux

– Better compression techniques / tools

– Improved site bandwidth

– Transfer of archived image data from sites to Tucson (i.e. Tape Drives)

• Demo…