Technical Meeting #8: Software conceptual design

This meeting took place on Tuesday 15 June 2010. Attendees: JSY, DFB, EBS, MF, ADR

Updated diagrams

Conclusions

• GUI should be separate process
  • Allows display on console for best performance
  • Can be started and stopped at user's convenience
• Thermal control
  • Scope of this software includes thermal control of camera enclosure
  • Thermal control should be active continuously, day and night
    • Does this include Peltier?
  • Separate process for thermal control (possibly with its own interface to the ISS) desireable, but requires dedicated I/O hardware
• Frame acquisition and data processing should be a real-time task in *all* modes
  • Not necessarily for FLC, depends on availability of RT camera data driver
• Prefer to use floating point calculations for centroiding and servo
  • EBS to find out if this means we must use Xenomai user-space real-time and hence tolerate context switches
• ISS Interface
  • Most commands (including mode switches) can be synchronous - avoids extra threads/callbacks
    • Exception would be any commands to move actuators
  • Same process as frame acquisition/data processing
• May need to account for future off-axis offsets when choosing initial position of subframe on FTT Mode start
  • Prefer not to have ISS perform calculation

New Tasks

Medium Priority

• EBS: Design real-time task in more detail
• JSY: Investigate use of multiple threads in ISS framework
• JSY: Ask Allen if systems are allowed to run indefinitely