**Proposed Use **
I want to use an SES arm as a sample changer in a neutron diffractometer. It would be picking up cylindrical cans one at a time that weigh at most a few tens of grams from an indexed grid. The arm would hold the can in the beam for maybe one-two hours. I would want the 5th degree of freedom in the wrist to slowly rotate or oscillate the cylinder in the beam. Radiation damage of the electronics should be negligible since they themselves will not be in the beam, and we regularly use servos (actually mostly steppers with resolvers/encoders) in this environment.
Attraction
This seems a lot cheaper custom-building a dedicated mechanical sample changer, and the RIOS programming looks simple.
**Computing and Interfacing
**
This is where my questions lies, since the arm seems very suitable to me for the actual physical manipulation: currently the diffractometer runs on a DEC Alpha under VMS (yes… they still exist). This VMS system currently controls the diffractometer from a fortran code via an old CAMAC system, but also communicates via RS232 to PCs that control ancilliaries such as furnaces, using Labview or home-written control programs.
I would be quite happy to run the arm on a laptop connected to the robot by USB/serial cables. However, somehow whatever routines I end up writing for the arm, the robot ultimately has to be interfaced to the VMS-system which controls the starting and stopping of scans. I notice that a socket system is provided for RIOS. However, socket programming from Alpha-VMS is not something I am familiar with. In fact, wherever possible, I would like to leave the VMS software unchanged and do most of the control from a PC, which would mean RS232 interfacing.
The easiest thing for us would be to send very basic signals from the VMS system via RS232 to the PC to execute particular modules (such as to pick up a particular can), and the PC then send the detailed instructions to the arm. Does this sound like something that is readily achievable with the existing software?
Also, knowing nothing, if we’re starting from scratch, what electronics and control boards are required?
Thanks for any help
Octopodes