3. Context of ELT Control GUIs
Graphical user interfaces for ELT Control have many areas to cover. To begin with, the reader should familiarise with the parties involved. First of all are the users of the System.
3.1. Users
These descriptions are called personas, and they are stereotyped descriptions used to understand the point of view of a user.
TIO: The TIO is an astronomy professional with a science or engineering background. Their training does not include programming or software development. Their main responsibilities include the operation of telescope, instruments.
Instrument Engineer: They are formally trained in instrumentation, electronics or electrical engineering. Their main tasks include the design or maintenance of instruments used in the observatory, including the development of UI for instruments. They are skilled at programming and uses it to interact directly to the device. They have learned concepts from astronomy. The Instrument Engineer may be a user of the system.
Software Engineer: They are electronics or software engineer, who have learned software development frameworks, knows programming and design of software components. Their main responsibilities include the development of the software that will be used to operate the observatory, and their products are used to connect control system to devices provided by the Instrument Engineer. They have learned concepts of astronomy. The Software Engineer is not a user of the system.
Consortia Developer: Has a scientific background and is an expert of the team that designs and develops a specific instrument but has no strong programming background. The Consortia Developer is not a user of the system.
It is crucial for user interfaces to be developed closely with the end-user. Software and Instrument Engineers should keep this in mind.
3.2. Locations
The Control Room and the ELT Plateau are in Chile, II Region de Antofagasta.
3.2.1. Control Room
The Control Room was built at 2600 [m] of altitude. It takes 40 minutes to drive from the Control Room to the ELT plateau. It is part of the VLT observatory installations.
The building that hosts the Control Room as at the south side of the VLT plateau. In the figure TODO the reader can see the approximate location and measurement of the control room.
Cerro Paranal satellite view. Lower-left highlighted area is the control room building.
It is 13 [m] by 22 [m] open room, with no cubicles spaces and with false ceiling and floor. It is a climate-regulated room. It has six operations setups at the moment, which hosts the UIs for the VLT software.
Each operation setup is a U-shaped desktop, with space for 5 persons. It has installed three computers, and three screens. Two of the computers are used to run the software for a specific instrument (Nasmyth 1 and 2), and the third, is used to control the telescope.
Light Conditions: There are windows that are in south-west orientation, which can cause a little bit of glare during the sunset, but nothing that makes operations uncomfortable. The lightning is fluorescent tubes (50Hz).
Sound Conditions: Though the room itself is not located in a noisy location, it can get loud due to the fact that there are 5 of these stations in the same room.
The operation setup for the ELT is TBD in accordance to IT and TIO indications.
Human Machine Interaction shall happen in the same machine. Inputs taken through devices from the user, and outputs presented to the user, and the application that conducts said operations, shall be hosted in the same computer. This is to reduce lag to the minimum possible. Computer to Computer interaction then can happen in other servers or computers.
3.2.2. ELT Plateau
The ELT Plateau is located at 3046 [m] over the sea level, and a 40 minutes drive from the Control Room, in Cerro Armazones. The actual distance between the two locations is 22 [km], but its driving distance is 32 [km].
Some engineering UIs and instrumentation UI are expected to run in this location (not exclusively). For those cases, we include the description of the ELT Plateau.
The operation of the software itself will be limited to the Main Structure and the Dome. The Dome itself is intended to be open during and leading to observing period, but during the day, is expected to be closed. But since the observing period is conducted at open-air temperatures, though the is no wind in the Dome, the temperatures can be low (from 0 to 15 [C]). Personnel in this area of working are obligated to use PPE, which includes gloves during low temperature seasons (not limited to winter), boots, parkas, safety helmets, several layers of clothing. During high temperature season, the users are more free in terms of PPE. All year round, the personnel is expected to use sun-screen.
Temperatures can influence in decisions on where to conduct a particular job. In cases of UI interaction, since most of them are remotely available, this can lead to conduct manual labor in-site, and UI jobs remotely (warm room, not necessarily the ELT Control Room). Also is common to work in pairs, one on-site, other remotely, cross-checking readings.
The Main structure will have several adjoining rooms for maintenance and engineering operations. Also Instruments maintenance will happen in this building. It is expected that this environment will work under a considerable noise. Audible cues should be avoided, since it would an exercise of futility. All screens in this area shall include a manner to turn them off.
Another set of UI found in this area, are the one attached to racks in the Instruments. Developed by Consortia, these UI are to be hosted by a Microcontroller Computer.
These computers come in a rackable solution, with a touchscreen, and can be used as a UI for a single program. Since they don’t have a mouse or keyboard, complex interactions (such as text input and fine selection or pointing) is not recommended. Operating Systems in these are of industrial applications have not catch up with commercial UI in other embedded solutions, so interactions could be severely limited. Figure 2 illustrates examples (therefore, do not consider this as a suggestion) of Beckhoff solutions used for HMI panels place here for reference. The first one uses a resistive touched, and the second one uses a button based keypad. There are models with capacitive touchscreen.
Example of touchscreen panels used for microcontrollers-based HMI solutions
3.2.3. GRAF/VRAF Remote operations
TBD. Will be added in a future version of this document.
3.3. Software Environment
ELT Control software is used to control and monitor the telescope, dome and its instruments during observation, and capture the necessary data for later science use. These guidelines offers advices and rules to developed user interfaces for this kind of software.
The ELT considers one LocalControlSoftware and LocalSupervisor per each main subsytems of the System. LCS software is developed by contract, for all subsystems except the M1. The High-LevelCoordinationAndControl software (LSV, SupervisoryApplications and User Interfaces) are to be developed using the ControlSoftwareInfrastructure, of which this UI toolkit is part of.
Control System product tree