Dear colleagues,
I'm submitting a paper to the Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation chapter of SPIE. The topic is on Gemini's latest upgrade to OSI and RTEMS. I'm looking for links to any citations
you believe I should include --especially regarding OSI and RTEMS.
More details on our project below.
Thank you for any input,
-Matt
Over the past years at The Gemini 8-meter Telescope Project, we have planned and are currently executing a comprehensive upgrade to our Real-time Control Systems. These systems were designed in the 90's during the EPICS 3.12.x and early 3.13.x era. They are exclusively standard VME with PowerPC or 68k CPU's, running VxWorks 5.4.x.
The principle upgrade goals were to establish a new EPICS 3.14.x development environment integrated with SVN, and rooted in the OSI framework allowing the migration to RTEMS. I'm pleased to announce that with the dedication of so many EPICS contributors over the years, we're seeing our dreams come to life! To date, Gemini has upgraded and released to operations six systems at each site (12 IOC's). These include:
- Telescope mount control
- 8-meter primary mirror control
- cassegrain rotator control
- Telescope weather monitor
- Camera calibration mechanism unit
- Telescope Interlock system
Currently, two more systems -- The Telescope Control and Secondary Mirror Control are actively under commissioning. In the coming months we will also commission our Enclosure Control System and the Acquisition and Guiding unit. This will complete our project totaling upgrades to no less than 20 IOC's depending on 32 EPICS support modules spanning two hemispheres! At Gemini we're grateful and indebted to the countless names of contributors allowing us to secure a manageable development environment into the 2020's and beyond.
Aloha,
--
Matt Rippa
Sr. Control Systems Software Engineer
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