Speaker
Description
The control interface to the microprobe has evolved pragmatically in step with user's needs over the past 40 years. In this process, utmost care was taken to create as little latency reacting to beam events as possible in order to accept the maximum amount of beam from the accelerator into the experiment. In the pre-FPGA or very early microcontroller era that meant implementing custom, hardwired dicrete electronic circuits. While the timing needs can be easily met that way, both experiment preparation and beam control rely on phyical interaction with circuitry and a plethora of knobs, DIP switches, and such to input irradiation parameters.
To allow for modern software interaction, scriptability, and remote operation, key control devices are now being retrofit with network interfaces and a soft real-time operating firmware. As an example, I will walk you through the upgrade of the beam scanning system.