ZShooter Instrument Control Software

This is the design documentation for the ZShooter Instrument Control System (ICS): the software that commands the instrument’s mechanisms, detectors, calibration hardware, and support infrastructure, and that presents the instrument to observers and engineers.

ZShooter’s ICS conforms to the Caltech Optical Observatories ICS architecture, which defines the minimum command-and-control spine shared by COO instruments. This documentation is the ZShooter-specific expansion of that specification: it names the concrete daemons, drivers, keywords, modes, safety rules, and workflows that the general specification deliberately leaves open.

Note

The ICS is in the design phase. No implementation scaffolding exists yet. These documents define what will be built and are expected to change as the requirements baseline and hardware controller topology firm up. Sections carrying open questions are marked with TBC.

Contents

• Overview
• Architecture
  • Design principles
  • Layer model
  • Messaging
  • Keywords and addressing
  • State models
  • Safety
  • Domain gateways
  • Configuration
  • Errors, alerts, and logging
• Inventory
  • Daemon inventory
  • Driver inventory
  • Deployment
• Interfaces
  • Observer GUI
  • Hard hat GUI
  • Command line
• Operations
  • Instrument modes
  • Operational workflows
• Development
  • Testing
  • Assembly, Integration and Test
  • Continuous integration
  • Releases and deployment
• Architectural decisions