A hardware/software environment for real time data acquisition and control

A. VEIGA; M.A. MAYOSKY; N. MARTÍNEZ

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NUCLEAR SCIENCE

IEEE

Lugar: New York; Año: 2000 vol. 47 p. 132 - 135

0018-9499

A data acquisition framework based on a RT-Linux host and several embedded processors is presented. A Constant Velocity Mössbauer Spectrometer with controlled temperature sweep is shown as a real experimental application. The hardware platform consists of a standard personal computer (PC) supporting several dedicated custom boards. Each board has a microcontroller and additional hardware to interface with the experiment. A simple real-time kernel with a preemptive scheduling scheme was implemented for the microcontroller boards. Tasks are assigned to each stand-alone board during the initialization step. The PC runs the Linux operating system, with its real time extension RT-Linux  The flow of data to and from the boards is implemented with real-time tasks through real-time FIFOs in an event-driven basis. The proposed structure dramatically simplifies the implementation of sophisticated user interfaces, using high level languages like Tcl/Tk or Java, for graphical and remote applications, without degrading real-time performance.