Synchronization of motor controller and PC system clocks
Frank Kittmann, Thomas Bertram, Florian Briegel, Lars Mohr, Jürgen Berwein · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2010
The power of the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) with its two 8.4m primary mirrors sharing a common mount will unfold its full potential with the LINC-NIRVANA (LN) instrument. LINC-NIRVANA is a German-Italian beam combiner for the LBT and will interfere the light from the two 8.4m mirrors of the LBT in Fizeau mode. More than 140 motors have to be handled by custom developed Motor Controllers (MoCons). One important feature of the MoCon is the support of externally computed trajectories. Motion profiles provide information on the movement of the motor along a defined path over a certain period of time. Such profiles can be uploaded to the MoCon over Ethernet and can be started at a specific time. For field derotation it is critical that the derotation trajectories are executed with a very precise relative and absolute timing. This raises the problem of the synchronization of the MoCon internal clock with the system time of the servers that are hosting LINCNIRVANA's Instrument Control Software. The MoCon time should be known by the servers with an uncertainty of few milliseconds in order to match the start time of the motion profile and the field rotation trajectory. In this paper we will discuss how to synchronize the MoCon internal time and the PC system time.