The instrument should be connected to the 19" rack-mounted box referred to here as the KSW box (for historical reasons). There are 2 cables for this, labelled shutter and mask, and these should be connected to the SH1 and MIR sockets on the rear of the KSW box. Once this is done, it should be possible to manually activate the shutter and mask from the front of the KSW box. If the small lamps light up, the shutter (or mask) will be in the closed position.
The instrument is controlled using a few simple programs which
send to the KSW box via the printer port of a PC. They read the status
of the instrument by the same means. The programs to download are:
CALIB.EXE
EXPOSE.EXE
FOCUS.EXE
MASKC.EXE
MASKO.EXE
SHUTC.EXE
SHUTO.EXE
STATUS.EXE
Use a PC with DOS, or with a DOS window under Windows (not Windows 2000). At the time of writing it is not known if the PN.S will have its own PC at the WHT or TNG.
A special forked cable has been made up which plugs into the printer port and then splits into "optie A" and "optie B". These are 25-pin connectors but only make use of a small number of pins and can therefore be extended by means of a serial line. This is important at the WHT (see below).
On the rear of the KSW box, there are two 9-pin sockets labelled "optie A" and "optie B". There are cables which connect here, terminating in 25-pin connectors. If these connectors were to be mated to the ones attached to the PC, the instrument could be run from the PC. In practice the PC will be at a great distance from the instrument. The possibilities at this point will be different between the WHT and TNG.
One of the possibilities is to run the control software on a PC mounted at the Cassegrain and to talk to this PC via ethernet. This was set up for us by Luis ....... and worked well. Communication was established between a Windows 2000 PC in the control room and the Pentium PC at the Cassegrain by means of the client/server program PCanywhere. In this case, the printer port mentioned above is that of the PC at Cass. Ideally the PC should be close to the KSW box so that the cables reach without having to be extended.
During the commissioning run we opted for a directly-accessable laptop in the control room. The signals are then brought
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Last updated 19-07-2001
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