AzCam Users Manual (Word)
Contents
1. AzCam User s Manual Michael Lesser University of Arizona Imaging Technology Laboratory 07 Oct 2011 Table of Contents INtPOdUCHON EE VErSIONIN peep een iiaa Sn aiaiai on rE OM nS NE npE OPM ESSE diii AzGam COMMANGS tistics sence SE a aii OHIO eet ee ee Return Values and ErrorS issssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssessessssssssssessessasssssssssessassassassssassensansassasenes Objects 3 UE Se ent El LEE Scripts 4 eet Header e tren Eil E AzCamLog and AztCamMonttor EEN lg el al EG AZGaIM DSP Oe Introduction AzCam is a software image data acquisition and analysis system developed at the University of Arizona Imaging Technology Laboratory It is currently used for Astronomical Research Cameras Inc Gen3 Gen2 and Gen1 CCD controllers and Magellan Guider controllers The AzCam web site containing the latest version of this document as well as files for downloading is located at http azcam itl arizona edu Additional AzCam documentation includes e AzCamInstallationManual containing installation and configuration information e AzCamToolsManual describing the standard graphical user interface e HTML documentation of AzCam functions found on the AzCam web site Versioning AzCam consists of many different modules some of which may be dynamically loaded as well as remote controller telescope instrument server code There is therefore no single version number or date which uniquely identifies all the code A2. a status for simplicity such as Print and some analysis commands which simply return calculated values Objects Python is an object oriented programming language and objects are used extensively in AzCam Object based commands provide control of all aspects of AzZCam These commands methods interact with hardware such as controllers instruments temperature controllers and telescopes as well as with more virtual objects such as the exposures images databases time communication interfaces etc The required command syntax is object Command where object is the object name such as controller instrument telescope and Command is the command to be sent If Command uses attributes they are specified as comma separated values of the appropriate type such as object Command ITL 1 234 45 For example to send the command CompsOn to the instrument use instrument CompsoOn To send the Get Focus command to the telescope use te lescope GetFocus A focalplane command might be focalplane SetRoi 1 100 1 200 2 3 User Commands There are built in AzCam commands which are always available to the command line All standard python commands are also always available to the command line A high level user command syntax may optionally be provided in additional to the standard AzCam commands User commands are defined on a system dependent basis and may include both object based and commands whi
3. ch do not require object names Scripts Scripts are Python commands which are intended to be run at the AzCam command line They may or may not be defined as User Commands Care should be taken when scripts are executed by remote clients since they often require user input prompting which is not supported remotely Scripts are especially useful to invoke GUIs such as PyQt programs and to execute user written commands Scripts are executed by the Run command and must be in the Python search path See the Scripting section later in this manual Attributes Python attributes may be read with the Get command and written with the Set command It is recommended that Get and Set be used when reading and writing attributes from remote clients For example Get ImageType returns the current image type The return value might be OK zero str The first value being the status the second ImageType the third indicating the return values type useful for clients which see all values as strings Object attributes may also be read and changed directly with Set and Get although clients should be very carefully when modifying objects directly For example Get controller TimingBoardiInstalled returns the value of the TimingBoardiInstalled parameter from the controller object as well as its data type specified as a string int in this case Note that Set instrument SomeParameter is not the
4. cted image format supports headers When an object such as an instrument or telescope is disabled the corresponding object database information is deleted and no longer updated AzCamLog and AzCamMonitor AzCamLog is a console like window which by default appears automatically along with the main AzCam window and is used to display messages These messages do not appear in the main console window since there would then be a complex mixture of messages from command line commands internal threading commands which run in the back ground and remote client commands AzCamLog is a special usage of AzCamMonitor AzCamMonitor is a python client which can be used to display messages from AzCam in a remote process It is for monitoring only no commands are sent to AzCam from AzCamMonitor To start AzCamMonitor execute the StartAzCamMonitor bat batch file Edit the command line parameters 7S ServerName and p PortNumber as needed ServerName js the host name of the machine running AzCam and PortNumber js the AzCam monitor port on AzCam usually one greater than the base port so typically 2403 for the first AzCam process Prompts will be displayed if no command line parameters are specified Scripting Scripts may be executed within AzCam for any user defined tasks including data acquisition and image analysis Scripts must be written in pure python There are many modules which define the various AzCam commands These modules must be imported into a
5. major version for AzCam can be read with Get Version Itisaversion string such as 4 60 and is incremented when significant changes are made All python source code modules may be examined for version information at the top of each file AzCam Commands This section describes AzCam syntax and commands It applies to releases 4 0 and later It is intended for relatively advanced users of AzCam including those writing scripts and client applications The most up to date command information is always available from the automatically generated HTML files found on the AzCam web site It is useful to have some basic knowledge of python when reading those files Conventions Commands or methods and attributes parameters are named with MixedCase convention as in focalplane SetFormat 1 512 1 512 1 1 or CheckAbort Objects such as focalplane are always all lower case Commands must have parentheses following their names even if no attributes are required Commands and attributes are case sensitive While some commands sent to the external ControllerServer program are case insensitive it is best to use the proper case for all commands and attributes Filenames should be given with forward slash separators even on Windows machines If back slashes are used for some reason they must be doubled as in c data Strings must be enclosed in quotation marks single preferred as in Get Version Quotation marks must
6. match Version is not acceptable A quotation mark may be included in a string by preceding it with a backslash I am Mike s dog AzCam commands should not use Python s print statement but instead use the Print function which prints to the AzCamLog system Scripts may use the print statement as they are generally designed to run from the command line The issue here is that AzCam commands are often run in threads by remote clients and printing to the console can easily become jumbled Return Values and Errors Nearly all AzCam commands return a python list in the format status valuel value2 where status is the string OK ERROR WARNING or ABORTED OK means the command executed successfully ERROR means the command encountered a problem WARNING is a special error case which is considered non fatal and should not produce a pop up message in a client application ABORTED means a command or process was aborted which may or may not be interpreted as an error Usually warnings appear only in the log window When status is ERROR then valuel is always an error message string describing the problem The error message string is enclosed in quotes as in ERROR bad parameter specified for action When replying to a client the python list is converted into a space delimited string so that a return value of OK valuel value2 would become OK valuel value2 There are a very few commands which do not return
7. ocated in a subfolder named params of the SystemFolder and are usually created automatically as needed Scripts may be included automatically in the AzCam startup procedure by adding them to the UserCommands module They can then be executed without the Run command e g SetDefauts rather than Run SetDefaults AzCam DSP Code The DSP code which runs in the ARC and Magellan controllers is assembled and linked with Motorola software tools The Motorola DSP tools installer can be found on the AzCam web site This file installs to create to the folder structure AzCam MotorolaDSPtools which is required by the batch files which assemble and link the DSP source code While the AzCam application code for the ARC timing board is typically downloaded during camera initialization the boot code must be compatible for this to work properly Therefore AzCam DSP code must be burned into the timing board EEPROMs before use The AzCam timing DSP code is quite different from the ARC code and is required for AzCam operation The PCI fiber optic interface board and the utility board use the original ARC code and does not need to be changed Note this applies to gen3 systems only the gen1 and gen2 situation is more complex For the Magellan systems there is only one DSP file which must be downloaded during initialization Note that xxx s files are loaded for the Magellan systems while xxx lod files are loaded for ARC systems
8. same as Set telescope SomeParameter since SomeParameter in each case is an attribute of a different object If no object is provided then the Globals object is assumed which contains global variables across all objects Header Commands AzCam uses object specific keyword indexed dictionary to maintain textual informational about some objects These are typically called headers as they are used to provide information in image headers The keywords and their corresponding values data type and comment field are stored in each of the controller instrument and telescope header dictionary These dictionaries are manipulated by commands both from clients and internally in AzCam Most of the values are written to the image file header such as a FITS header when an exposure begins The dictionaries are accessed through methods such as controller Header GetAllKeywords and instrument Header GetKeyword FILTER1 The ReadHeader method of each object will actively read hardware to obtain information such as controller ReadHeader or instrument ReadHeader This is very different from the object Header xxx methods which only manipulate the internal Header databases The telescope and instrument dictionaries are considered temporary and re read every time an exposure starts This is so that rapidly changing data values do not become stale Most dictionary information is written to the image file header if the sele
9. script before they can be used Scripts should include the line from AzCam import to include the base AzCam commands Scripts should also include the line from UserCommands import to include user defined commands if they exist After these files are imported the AzZCam commands are available as for example exposure Expose or controller Reset A script cannot be run outside of AzCam e g from File Explorer since scripts require global data structures which are only defined within the AzCam python enviroment We do not recommend executing scripts from a remote client since there may be complex interactions between plotting windows the command line console and task running in the background Running some scripts which do not have user interaction can be safe when called from a remote client Scripts are usually executed using the Run command as Run GetTemps This method has the advantage of loading the script each time the run command is called which is useful when debugging a script In the first method above the script is only imported when AzCam starts and subsequent script edits are not registered When arguments are supplied on the command line using Run they must be space delimited and not placed in parentheses So Run GetTemps 0 2 logfilel txt is OK but Run GetTemps 0 2 logfilel txt is not Scripts may have an initialization file scriptname ini which is used to read and save defaults values These files are l
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