Control software architecture for the SALT Robert Stobie Spectrograph

Abstract

Of the two first-light instruments commissioned for the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) the Robert Stobie Spectrograph (RSS) represents the most intricate instrument to control on SALT. As such the RSS control software (RCON) called for a design that would handle the necessary elaborate configuration commands required to coordinate the various hardware mechanisms of RSS into the desired states. In this paper we describe in detail the software architecture, developed in LabVIEW, used to control the RSS hardware mechanisms. A command ID based array system was developed to allow the multi-faceted commands to execute in order to facilitate the shortest configuration times and managing all of the hardware interdependencies.