RoboDIMM's software

Server & user interfaces

The RoboDIMM’s main function is to collect seeing measurements, all night long. It does so by driving the hardware peripherals, like the telescope mount, CCD camera, focuser, and other devices. After the software has pointed the telescope to a suitable target star, multiple series of CCD exposures are made to determine the variance in motion between the spot-pairs. The results are then used to calculate the seeing FWHM’s, extinction and scintillation.  All data is stored in a local database and can be offloaded from the server.

The RoboDIMM server software can be configured and monitored either locally or from a remote location by using the provided graphical user interface (X11) or by using a simple ssh/telnet-shell. Real-time plots are accessible through a webserver also, if enabled.

More information on RoboDIMM's software package:

• Core software (server)
• User interfaces (clients)

Operating System

RoboDIMM runs on Linux. Here are the ten major reasons for choosing Linux:

• Flexibility to adjust system parameters and software
• No licensing issues
• Good stability, we don’t need crashes
• Good performance
• Standards-compliance
• Diverse hardware support
• Native Internet support
• Interoperability with existing systems
• Pthread  (an advanced Linux-related process threading model)
• Low cost