AO Workbench for the Hawaii Community College

Update

The project was completed in 2007 and the AO workbench is now located at HCC.

• AO_workbench_manual.doc: This is a Preliminary Document for the workbench
• Parts inventory with price (April 2007)
• See the movie where James gives an introduction to the AO workbench.

Project Scope

Scope: Iris AO, inc., in collaboration with the Center for Adaptive Optics (CfAO^?), is assembling an Adaptive Optics Workbench at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC). The AO Workbench is a self-enclosed, standalone device that consists of an optical breadboard, a computer, and several high-voltage drivers. It uses a 37-actuator deformable mirror and a Shack-Hartmann sensor to achieve closed-loop adaptive optics operation in real time.

Similar devices are currently being used for demonstrating AO principles to tour groups, facilitating education on AO instrumentation, and for in-depth research in optics, all to great success. One system is currently housed at the Laboratory for Adaptive Optics at UC Santa Cruz, and a second system is housed at Maui Community College.

The three major goals for this project are: (1) Construct and align optics in AO system and configure hardware drivers; (2) Build graphical user interfaces (GUIs) with Visual C++, Matlab, or possibly IDL for use by other students; and (3) Document the construction of the system and the GUIs, and if time permits, write a summary of this information.

Resource:

• Iris AO is co-founding this project.
• Iris AO Work bench parts notes

Documentation

• A screen shot from the early attempts to close a loop.:
  

• Running a closed loop:
  
• untitled.tif: Hexagonal array drawn in matlab

Optical Design:

The reference design for LAO's workbench is this document.

This Word document contains the evolving design for the current demonstrator in the LAO. The design for Iris AO's workbench, on the other hand, is very similar to the design on PAGE 7; there are some focal length changes and beam diameter changes.

Starting from the collimated laser, the first lens relay set will now be a pair of 100 mm lenses. These recollimate the beam and reimage the pupil onto Iris AO's DM. The second relay set is a pair of 200 mm lenses, also recollimating into the wavefront sensor. This second relay reimages the pupil onto Iris AO's lenslet array.

In collimated space, the beam diameter is a constant 3 mm. This is set by an iris in atmosphere space. All lenses are one inch diameter. We've chosen the focal lengths to (1) minimize the total system size, (2) make it easy to align and obtain good Strehl (i.e., relatively slow lenses), (3) to image the PSF at Nyquist sampling at the science camera, and (4) to keep the beam diameter constant.

Timeline

• For reference: draft curriculum for the project.

Technical Meetings/notes

• Meeting_april_4.doc: To do list from quick meeting 4/4/07
• Computer requirements:
  • at least 2 PCI slots
  • Matrox Solios frame grabber
  • MIL LITE software
  • Windows XP Pro
  • Matlab Education version (needs to be able to build widget as well)
• IrisAO^? has purchased all camera parts (Uniq Vision 680 CL, Power supply, Front End for 600 CL (same as 680 CL) + camera link cable)
• We agree to start mounting and debugging the system with a degraded mirror. IrisAO^? will supply better ones as we get more reliable to handle them.
• Software requirements for AO control:
  • Some in Matlab, some command lines, some C,
  • Not clear whether we will have to rewrite some routines to make it compatible with the new hardware interfaces.