UNICS - An Unified Instrument Control System for Small/Medium Sized Astronomical Observatories

摘要

Although the astronomy community is witnessing an era of large telescopes,smaller and medium sized telescopes still maintain their utility being largerin numbers. In order to obtain better scientific outputs it is necessary toincorporate modern and advanced technologies to the back-end instruments and totheir interfaces with the telescopes through various control processes. Howeveroften tight financial constraints on the smaller and medium size observatorieslimit the scope and utility of these systems. Most of the time for every newdevelopment on the telescope the back-end control systems are required to bebuilt from scratch leading to high costs and efforts. Therefore a simple, lowcost control system for small and medium size observatory needs to be developedto minimize the cost and efforts while going for the expansion of theobservatory. Here we report on the development of a modern, multipurposeinstrument control system UNICS (Unified Instrument Control System) tointegrate the controls of various instruments and devices mounted on thetelescope. UNICS consists of an embedded hardware unit called Common ControlUnit (CCU) and Linux based data acquisition and User Interface. The Hardware ofthe CCU is built around the Atmel make ATmega 128 micro-controller and isdesigned with a back-plane, Master Slave architecture. The Graphical UserInterface (GUI) has been developed based on QT and the back end applicationsoftware is based on C/C++. UNICS provides feedback mechanisms which give theoperator a good visibility and a quick-look display of the status and modes ofinstruments. UNICS is being used for regular science observations since March2008 on 2m, f/10 IUCAA Telescope located at Girawali, Pune India.