Development of a CPU-based architecture for high performance adaptive optics systems

A basic Adaptive Optics setup is composed of three key elements: a wavefront sensor to detect the aberrations; a deformable mirror to correct such aberrations; and a closed loop control system connecting both sensor and deformable mirror in order to reduce the aberrations. The control system can be realized by the use of a dedicated platform such as an FPGA or GPU, because dedicated hardware can guarantee higher performances than software written for generic architecture such as CPU [1][2]. On the other hand, such solutions need more development time and hardware than a CPU-based approach, thus being more expensive both towards the developer and the end user. Moreover they are not flexible, operating on a strict selection of hardware. The proposed solution aims to becost-effective adaptive optics setup. It is a CPU-based approach that relies on Qt, which is a cross-platform application, and UI framework [3]. By using Qt Creator, an IDE specifically designed to work with Qt, the development effort is greatly reduced:natively manages both code and GUI, and, given the required toolchains, it can be easily compiled in many different platforms, without source differentiation. The source written and compiled in C++ language, so that it runs fast with minimum overhead from the Qt classes. We demonstrate that the system can operate in real time at more than 100Hz frequency