Towards Improved Accessibility of the Tango Controls

International audienceTango Controls is successfully applied at more than 40 scientific institutions and industrial projects. These institutions do not only use the software but also actively participates to its development. The Tango Community raised several projects and activities to support collaboration as well as to make Tango Controls being easier to start with. Some of the projects are led by S2Innovation. These projects are: gathering and unifying of Tango Controls documentation, providing a device classes catalogue and preparation of a so-called TangoBox virtual machine. Status of the projects will be presented as well as their impact on the Tango Controls collaboration

ESRF Ramping Injector Power Supply Controlled by Tango

International audienceA new design of ESRF booster power supply system has been developed and installed. A multiple power supplies control through network including real time control is now operational at ESRF. It manages 4 power supplies to generate 3 waveforms defined with 3x1600 values in a setpoint file. The power supplies states are managed by PLCs. The ramping waveforms are managed by a real time program running on a FPGA board. And a high level control on top of them is assumed by a TANGO multiple classes system. This paper presents how these three levels of controls are interlinked and show the results achieve

Tango Controls RFCs

International audienceIn 2019, the Tango Controls Collaboration decided to write down a formal specification of the existing Tango Controls protocol as Requests For Comments (RFC). The work resulted in a Markdown-formatted specification rendered in HTML and PDF on Readthedocs.io. The specification is already used as a reference during Tango Controls source code maintenance and for prototyping a new implementation. All collaborating institutes and several companies were involved in the work. In addition to providing the reference, the effort brought the Community more value: review and clarification of concepts and their implementation in the core libraries in C++, Java and Python. This paper summarizes the results, provides technical and organizational details about writing the RFCs for the existing protocol and presents the impact and benefits on future maintenance and development of Tango Controls

New Developments for the HDB++ TANGO Archiving System

International audienceTANGO HDB++ is a high performance event-driven archiving system which stores data with micro-second resolution timestamps, using archivers written in C++. HDB++ currently supports MySQL and Apache Cassandra back-ends but could be easily extended to support additional back-ends. Since the initial release many improvements and new features have been added to the HDB++. In addition to bug-fixes and optimizations, the support for context-based archiving allows to define an archiving strategy for each attribute, specifying when it has to be archived or not. Temporary archiving is supported by means of a time-to-live parameter, available on a per-attribute basis. The Cassandra back-end is using Cassandra TTL native feature underneath to implement the time-to-live feature. With dynamic loading of specific libraries switching back-ends can be done on-the-fly and is as simple as changing a property. Partition and maintenance scripts are now available for HDB++ and MySQL. The HDB++ tools, such as extraction libraries and GUIs, followed HDB++ evolution to help the user to take full advantage of the new features

The ESRF's Extremely Brilliant Source - a 4th Generation Light Source

International audienceAfter 20 years of operation, the ESRF has embarked upon an extremely challenging project - the Extremely Brilliant Source (ESRF - EBS) . The goal of this project is to construct a 4th generation light source storage ring inside the existing 844m long tunnel. The EBS will increase the brilliance and coherence by a factor of 100 with respect to the present ESRF storage ring. A major challenge is to keep the present ring operating 24x7 while designing and pre-constructing all the elements of the new ring. This is the first time a 4th generation light source will be constructing inside an existing tunnel. This paper concentrates on the control system aspects. The control system is 100% TANGO based. The paper will list the main challenges of the new storage ring like the Hot Swap Powersupply, the new timing system, how reliable operation was maintained while modernizing the injector control system and preparing the new storage ring control system, the new historical database, and how extensive use was made of software simulators achieve this

TANGO Heads for Industry

International audienceThe TANGO Controls Framework* continues to mature and be adopted by new sites and applications. This paper will describe how TANGO has moved closer to industry with the creation of startups and addressing industrial use cases. It will describe what progress has been made since the last ICALEPCS in 2015 to ensure the sustainability of TANGO for scientific and industrial users. It will present TANGO web based technologies and the deployment of TANGO in the cloud. Furthermore it will describe how the community has re-organised itself to fund and improve code sharing, documentation, code quality assurance and maintenance

Pushing the Limits of Tango Archiving System using PostgreSQL and Time Series Databases

International audienceThe Tango HDB++ project is a high performance event-driven archiving system which stores data with micro-second resolution timestamps, using archivers written in C++. HDB++ supports MySQL/MariaDB and Apache Cassandra backends and has been recently extended to support PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB*, a time-series PostgreSQL extension. The PostgreSQL backend has enabled efficient multi-dimensional data storage in a relational database. Time series databases are ideal for archiving and can take advantage of the fact that data inserted do not change. TimescaleDB has pushed the performance of HDB++ to new limits. The paper will present the benchmarking tools that have been developed to compare the performance of different backends and the extension of HDB++ to support TimescaleDB for insertion and extraction. A comparison of the different supported back-ends will be presented

State of the Tango Controls Kernel Development in 2019

This paper will present the state of of kernel developments in the Tango Controls toolkit and community since the previous ICALEPCS 2017. It will describe what changes have been made over the last 2 years to the Long Term Support (LTS) version, how GitHub has been used to provide Continuous Integration (CI) for all platforms, and prepare the latest source code release. It will present how docker containers are supported, how they are being used for CI and for building digital twins. It will describe the outcome of the kernel code camp(s). Finally it will present how Tango is preparing the next version - V10. The paper will explain why new and old installations can continue profiting from Tango Controls or in other words in Tango 'the more things change the better the core concepts become'

On-sky Testing of the Active Phasing Experiment

International audienceThe Active Phasing Experiment (APE) has been used by ESO to gain experience in controlling segmented primary mirrors in preparation for the European Extremely Large Telescope. The experiment tested various phasing techniques and explored their advantages and limitations. Four optical phasing sensors were developed using different techniques — a curvature sensor, a pyramid sensor, a Shack-Hartmann sensor and a sensor based on a modified Mach-Zehnder interferometer. The design of the APE instrument is described. APE was installed at the VLT visitor focus for on-sky testing and a brief summary of the results of the experiment is given