Bates power supply control and interface system for the South Hall Ring Project

The Bates South Hall Ring will require over 2000 power supplies, ranging from under 100 W for the steering coils to over 90 kW for the extraction line bending magnets. The authors describe all the elements used in the power supply control chain, including an in-house developed power supply controller, the local area computer (LAC) used to control groups of power supplies, and the general mechanism used by the South Hall Ring Control System to access them. These interface elements were designed to permit both remote access to the power supplies as high-level abstract objects (optical elements) and local control for diagnostics. The distributed nature of the power supply controllers facilitates the rapid hardware reconfiguration of the power supply grid, and the use of a central database server to store and retrieve the description of the power supply characteristics makes it very easy to add, subtract, or modify an element in the power supply system.<>