REVOLT is an experimental testbed that will be used to test novel AO components and AO techniques on sky at the 1.2m telescope of the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory. In its initial configuration that will be tested on-sky in spring 2022, REVOLT will have one deformable mirror, an ALPAO DM 277 and a Shack-Hartmann WFS based on a newly developed 512x512 pixel Near-Infrared Avalanche Photodiode array (Saphira). This testbed will be controlled at frame rates of up to 1 kHz by a Real-Time Controller (RTC) based on HEART1. HEART has gone through extensive testing and benchmarking, but this is the first time it will be tested on-sky. This paper will discuss customization of HEART required by REVOLT for the specified hardware, the issues found and lessons learned, the performance achieved during operations and the upgrades performed on HEART as a result.
Herzberg Extensible Adaptive Real-time Toolkit (HEART) is a collection of libraries and other software that can be used to create different types of Adaptive Optics (AO) systems. Pixels can be received from Laser Guide Star (LGS) Wavefront Sensors (WFSs), high-order Natural Guide Star (NGS) WFSs, On-Instrument WFSs (OIWFSs) that are located in the science instruments, and on-detector guide windows (ODGW) from science imagers. These inputs are processed in real-time by HEART to compute commands to configure the deformable mirrors (DMs) and the tip-tilt stage (TTS), as well as offloading information to selected mechanisms in the RTC, in the telescope and in the client instruments. This paper will explore the internal structure of HEART. In particular, the concept of “blocks”, which are reusable software units from which an RTC can be composed, how “pipes” are used to combine blocks in a meaningful manner and ultimately how those pipes can be used to realize many different types of real-time controllers (RTCs) such as SCAO (Single Conjugate AO), Multi-Conjugate AO (MCAO), Multi-Object AO (MOAO), and Ground Layer AO (GLAO). HEART is currently being implemented for use in NFIRAOS (Near Field Infra-Red AO System) for TMT, GNAO (Gemini North Adaptive Optics system), GIRMOS (Gemini Infrared Multi-Object Spectrograph), GPI2.0 (Gemini Planet Imager upgrade) and REVOLT (Research, Experiment and Validation of adaptive Optics with a Legacy Telescope).
This paper will discuss the Gemini Infrared Multi-Object Spectrograph (GIRMOS) with a focus on the design of its facility class Adaptive Optics (AO) Real Time Controller (RTC). The GIRMOS Adaptive Optics Real-Time Controller (GIRMOS RTC) will be developed using the Herzberg Extensible Adaptive Real-time Toolkit (HEART), a C/C++ software framework for constructing RTCs that targets general-purpose CPUs and standard networking hardware. The GIRMOS RTC just finished a successful pre-build phase where the custom parts of GIRMOS were designed and it was shown how the design incorporated HEART’s software modules. The GIRMOS RTC as a Multi-Object implementation of HEART will leverage a decade of design, modelling, and prototyping effort aimed to support the performance and configurability requirements of AO systems, with support for multiple client science instruments. This paper will discuss how HEART can be customized for a Multi-Object AO (MOAO) system.
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