The S-1 Spheromak Control System

The use of a CAMAC based DEC LSI-11/23 microcomputer to perform all control functions for the S-1 Spheromak is described. The system monitors and controls the three coil systems, Toroidal, Poloidal, and Equilibrium field coils and their associated power sources, the water cooling system, the personnel and machine safety system, the machine and diagnostic timing system and the control room display and operator interface. Future requirements include control of the vacuum system, the gas injection system and interface to the PPPL Data Acquisition System DEC10. The computer is connected to five remotely located CAMAC crates by a fiber-optic serial highway operating at five megahertz. These crates contain interface modules required to control the S-1 experiment. These modules include: D/A and A/D converters, fast transient digitizers, timing modules, temperature sensing modules, CRT alphanumeric display drivers, watchdog timers, and relay and TTL parallel I/O ports. The computer itself resides in crate number0 and consists of an LSI-11/23 with hardware floating post processor, memory management, 256K bytes of memory, four RS-232 serial ports and a 30 megabyte hard disk with a one megabyte floppy disk backup. The majority of software is written in FORTRAN with a few speed critical programs written in PDP-11 MACRO assembly language. The software simulates a sequential state machine which allows easily changeable logic since all logic is represented by standard Boolean Fortran statements. The RSX-11/m operating system allows multiple tasks to be active simultaneously. This provides computing time for operator interactions, editing of critical machine parameters, data analysis and transmission of data to other computers while still maintaining the scan activity which constantly monitors machine parameters