[luau] Redstar3

[Charles Lockhart]

Ok, probably nobody cares, but the group I work for/with has pretty much 
finished our first iteration of the Redstar3 array controller.  An array 
in this case is an infrared ccd.  The system is the main controller for 
imaging for astronomy.  I mention it only because it's running Linux.

It has two embedded devices, ppc systems (market name is the "IpEngine", 
mixed reviews) which are running Linux, a "pixelserver" running redhat 
7.2 with a generic kernel that's been patched with the rml preemptive 
kernel patch.  All the code for those is written in C.  The IC, the main 
software for interacting with all the subsystems, and the client gui are 
written in Java.  We're using sockets for the more primitive and limited 
interfaces, we're using the ORBit CORBA stuff and the java CORBA stuff 
for the more advanced interfaces.

Is that interesting?  Probably not.  We're still working on it, it 
requires some amount of customization for each individual instrument 
that it becomes integrated with.  And a second generation using RTAI is 
kind of in the works.

-Charles