Design and implementation of a service-oriented driver architecture for LINC-NIRVANA

Abstract

LINC-NIRVANA (LN) is a German-Italian Fizeau (imaging) interferometer for the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT). The Instrument Control Software (ICS) of this instrument is a hierarchical, distributed software package, which runs on several computers. In this paper we present the bottom layer of the hierarchy - the Basic Device Application (BASDA) layer. This layer simplifies the development of the ICS through a general driver architecture, which supports different types of hardware. This generic device architecture provides a high level interface to encapsulate the hardware dependent driver. The benefit of such a device architecture is to keep the basic device-driver layer flexible and independent from the hardware, and to keep the hardware transparent to the ICS. Additionally, the basic device-driver layer supports interfaces to IDL based applications for calibration and laboratory testing of astronomical instruments, and interfaces to engineering GUIs that allow to maintain the software components easily