[Uts-cvs] uts/doc Technical_Description,NONE,1.1

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	Technical_Description 
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Added technical description of the project.



--- NEW FILE: Technical_Description ---
Instruments are controlled by a daemon. These daemons are 
composed by three programs: 
 
1. A low level driver program, which interfaces to the hardware 
such as a telescope or CCD camera. All the hardware-specific 
code is kept in this level. 
 
2. A generic instrument daemon. This program sends requests to 
the driver using a standard "protocol". 
 
3. A communication daemon - the Secretary. The instrument 
daemon feeds the secretary with its status. All other instruments
that need to know the status of this instrument, will talk to
this
program. 
 
In our first approach there are three instruments. A telescope 
(Meade LX-200), a CCD camera (SBIG ST-7E) and a "virtual"
instrument called Synchronizer, which takes care of scheduling 
of observations. It receives observational data (coordinates, 
imaging information, etc) from a web interface. 
 
One important character of the instrument control daemons is 
that they do not receive commands, but rather take their 
decisions based on the status of the rest of the observatory. We 
believe that with this approach we avoid a super-complex 
control program that takes care of everything, having instead
the
"intelligence" distributed through the various daemons.
 
All the programs are being written in C/C++, and some scripts in 
python and PHP. The communication is made through network 
sockets, using the Simple Sockets Library. Please see 
http://users.erols.com/astronaut/ssl/