C-RED image acquisition

Documentation from C-RED from First Light company

DataSheet

C-RED SPIE2016

C-RED review for interferometry (SPIE2016)

C-RED wavefront sensing (SPIE2016)

FLI simulator installation notes

Notes of the C-RED simulator installation.

A) Powering the computer:

 1. Operating system is xubuntu, which is recommended to use at chara.

 2. It booted directly, without promting the password. I saw the booting was very quick.

 3.  computer name:simu-desktop and user: simu

 4. uname -a, command results:
 Linux simu-desktop 3.19.0-25-generic #26~14.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jul 24 21:16:20 UTC 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

 5. lsb_release -a, command results:
 Distributor ID: Ubuntu
 Description:    Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS
 Release:        14.04
 Codename:       trusty

 6. df -h, disk space
 Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
 /dev/sda5       116G  5,4G  104G   5% /
 none            4,0K     0  4,0K   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
 udev            3,8G  4,0K  3,8G   1% /dev
 tmpfs           767M  1,2M  766M   1% /run
 none            5,0M  4,0K  5,0M   1% /run/lock
 none            3,8G   92K  3,8G   1% /run/shm
 none            100M   20K  100M   1% /run/user

 7. free -h, memeory
            total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
 Mem:          7,5G       3,7G       3,8G       153M        64M       1,0G
 -/+ buffers/cache:       2,6G       4,9G 
 Swap:         1,9G         0B       1,9G

 8. cred installable sources located at: /home/simu/firstlight/

 chrpath         credonedemo-src-1.0.0.tgz  InstallationLog.txt  libQt5Core.so.5        libQt5Widgets.so.5  uninstall.dat
 components.xml  credone_mil.dcf            libicudata.so.51     libQt5DBus.so.5        network.xml         uninstall.ini
 creddemo-src    icons                      libicui18n.so.51     libQt5Gui.so.5         platforms
 credoneDemo     imageformats               libicuuc.so.51       libQt5SerialPort.so.5  uninstall

 9. credoneDemo is the real time diaplay executable for the detector.

B) Powering the first light data acquisition electronics:

The real time display has following buttons:

1) Important image acquisition settings
  a) Build bias and flat. Once they are build there are other clicable options to use them.
  b) Gain range selection button
  c) Exposure time (co-add of frames) settings for correlation double sampling (CDS) and single readout modes.
  d) Image crop option
  e) Save images buffer allows to acquire detector images with a user selectable number of frames.
  f) Various image display settings
  
2) PELTIER Cooling system:
  g) power monitor
  h) temperature monitor
   

C) Data acquisition: By changing the exposure time (or varying the number of frames), test detector images are acquired, for practice.

  Test_5000.raw
  Test_3000.raw
  Test_1000.raw
  

Future work notes

1. For first phase, after discussion with John, I understand that we will replace only the detector (in C-RED one; out PICNIC). It means that we will use the existing python GUIs which are optimized for taking the background, plotting the power spectrum and the fringe searching. It means, first, I need to understand the commands working behind the FLI real time display GUI and apply them to the existing MIRC python GUI. Second, the C-RED software currently produces *.raw extension data and that needs to converted into FITS extension.

Also, C-RED data acquisition on a new computer with different camera cards. Optimize the MIRC DAQ software for the C-RED detector array and speed.

3. Second phase, upgrade and develop more appropriate GUIs in the software practices of CHARA (with GTK software).

3. Third, optics upgrades and so on.