Megacam Software Developers' Page

Welcome. More general information on the Megacam project can be found on the main CFHT Web site. This page is mainly of interest to those involved in the software developement effort. Any relevant documentation should at a minimum have a link referring to it on this site. Preferably, an actual copy of the document should be mirrored here. To contribute new documents, or new versions to this page, please see Submission Guidelines at the end of this page.

Documents

Docs from CFHT Relevant to Software Design

Applications

The Megacam Agent, "MA"

Communications

Communications for megacam can be subdivided into three major categories, and at this point it seems likely that, because of their differences, they may be handled by three different methods:
Data Feed
NOAO's message bus system, currently in use with their 8K by 8K mosaic, will be used to send data directly from the CCD host to the final destination(s) (disk, image display, data archive.) This system uses PVM (parallel virtual machine) to establish a socket connection with the appropriate machine and sends raw, scrambled data to the other end for processing. We will be gaining more experience with NOAO's message bus and related tools as we use it with the UH8K and CFH12K mosaics. More information on the data feed will be posted as we gain some experience with the software. Meanwhile just getting the raw data to disk with some minimal fits headers might be the best plan. Keep in mind, however, that in the final analysis we will need to have packets written to the message bus instead, but this should not be such a major issue. The message bus protocol is quite flexible, and will be able to accept packets containing a mix of (scrambled or not) pixels streams (possibly even coming from several controllers at the same time) plus fits headers and assemble it all for you.
Command/Response
Issues such as sending a command request to an application, or getting feedback messages to the user will be managed by CFHT's director program. Facilities for scripting, accepting commands from a Graphical User Interface (GUI), and providing a user-friendly text interface to the user will all be handled by the director. The manual for director describes its function as compared to older ideas already in place at CFHT. Keep this in mind when you see references to "handlers" and "servers".
  • CFHT Director version 2 includes tips for writing a command driven program, called an "Agent". The appendix has instructions for building director on your system.
  • director-2.6.tgz [0.30 MB] contains the source code plus supporting CFHT libraries and Makefiles. If you're really stuck, we can provide a binary for Solaris, but please try and build it first.
  • rxvt-2.19-cfht.tgz [0.35 MB] is a patched version of the rxvt color text terminal. If you don't care about colors, you can just run director in an Xterm window or any other terminal type supported by the ncurses library. The tar file includes SunOS, Solaris, and HP-UX 9 binaries, source, some Xdefaults (to be merged into your xrdb or included in your .Xdefaults/.Xresources), a background pixmap image, and a fixed font (vga.pcf). You don't need all this stuff, but it just makes it look nice if you install it all properly. Shift-Numpad-Plus and Shift-Numpad-Minus increase/decrease the font size. A mirror of the man pages for rxvt are available on this site, and are also included with the tar file.
  • ncurses-4.1-cfht.tgz [1.35 MB] may also be useful because it is known to work well with rxvt-2.19-cfht. Links to some documentation on ncurses and its libraries is included, and is also mirrored on this site.
State Information
Internally within your program you will likely have a number of state variables storing things like the current filter position, shutter opened/closed, etc. Please design your code with hooks that will allow "broadcasting" these to other programs that may be interested in the information. The traditional way of distributing state information at CFHT has been to create "par files" and write the data into these files, but we would like to find a more elegant and efficient way for the Megacam project. Channel access "process variables" from EPICS may be one option, or something as simple as printf'ing a single line with "variable=value\n" to director may work, assuming director could then broadcast it via channel access, but the detials of this have not yet been deterimined.

Submission Guidelines

Please send in links to relavent documentation elsewhere on the Web and I will add a link or make a copy of documentation to keep locally on http://software.cfht.hawaii.edu/megacam/.

To contribute a new document, please create a .tar or .zip file and upload it to the directory ftp://ftp.cfht.hawaii.edu/pub/daprog/isani/incoming/. Then send me (isani@cfht.hawaii.edu) an email message to let me know it's there. The archive should contain:

  1. A single, self contained HTML document OR
    A single subdirectory with the HTML files plus any supporting GIFs that may be required to make the page complete.
  2. If the HTML format is in multiple pages, please supply a PostScript and/or PDF version of the whole document as well.
Minor points: