The new classic data acquisition system for NPOI

Abstract

The New Classic data acquisition system is an important portion of a new project of stellar surface imaging with the NPOI, funded by the National Science Foundation, and enables the data acquisition necessary for the project. The NPOI can simultaneously deliver beams from 6 telescopes to the beam combining facility, and in the Classic beam combiner these are combined 4 at a time on 3 separate spectrographs with all 15 possible baselines observed. The Classic data acquisition system is limited to 16 of 32 wavelength channels on two spectrographs and limited to 30 s integrations followed by a pause to ush data. Classic also has some limitations in its fringe-tracking capability. These factors, and the fact that Classic incorporates 1990s technology which cannot be easily replaced are motivation for upgrading the data acquisition system. The New Classic data acquisition system is based around modern electronics, including a high-end Stratix FPGA, a 200 MB/s Direct Memory Access card, and a fast modern Linux computer. These allow for continuous recording of all 96 channels across three spectrographs, increasing the total amount of data recorded by a an estimated order of magnitude. The additional computing power on the data acquisition system also allows for the implementation of more sophisticated fringe-tracking algorithms which are needed for the Stellar Surface Imaging project. In this paper we describe the New Classic system design and implementation, describe the background and motivation for the system as well as show some initial results from using it.