The design of the control system for ANKA

ANKA is a low budget light source. It has to be built with minimal cost. This includes a short construction period to keep the personnel cost low. The use of ANKA as an industrial light source on the other hand places tight constraints on the reliability of its components and its operation. In the creation of the control system one has to minimise in-house development and maximise the use of commercial-quality products. Here, the term commercial-quality applies equally to off-the-shelf-products and to products in the public domain or from other accelerator centres that are field proven and are documented at a level equal to commercial products. It has been our goal to search for the simplest model and thus the most reliable one. Our extensive investigations have shown that none of the actions and responses of the control system for ANKA need a real-time operating system. Therefore, we have disposed of the whole middle layer of the control system including VME crates in favour of a fieldbus network which connects the individual devices directly to the console computers. The consoles will be PCs running Windows NT. The fieldbus candidate is LonWorks from Echelon which provides plug-and-play and requires almost no additional development. On the software side we have opted for TACO, an object oriented control system environment developed at the ESRF