Sofware framework for controlling any linear or rotation axis and any sensor of a telescope

The "Gran Telescopio de Canarias" (GTC) is an optical-infrared 10-meter segmented mirror telescope at the ORM observatory in Canary Islands (Spain). In 2009 it started its scientific operational phase. The GTC Control System (GCS) is a distributed object and component-oriented system. In the first developments, the different motion control and sensor systems were quite coupled to the technologies that were used for their implementation: PMAC controller, CANOpen protocol, Modbus protocol, specific drives such as Kollmorgen Servostar S700 or Technosoft IDM680, ESD CAN library, etc. This work has been the result of the evolution of these developments carried out in the field rotation, acquisition and guiding systems of the focal stations updated in recent years. All the knowledge acquired in this context has been reflected in a new design, generalizing concepts such as mechanism, axis, actuator, bus protocol and access library, in such a way that the components of the coordination package are completely decoupled from the technology that is used for the effective control of movement. On the one hand, this design provides simplicity, since the creation of new devices is reduced to specifying a configuration. And on the other hand, it provides stability to the system, focusing the points of variability on the simple extension of new technologies that will be incorporated into the system, such as Ethercat. One of the objectives has been to reduce development costs, going from an effort of more than a year to just a few weeks, in this way we accelerate the transfer to operation of the functionalities that we continue to incorporate into the telescope and export this solution to any other telescope. Examples of this are the future New Robotic Telescope (NRT) and the European Solar Telescope (EST), which will benefit from this new framework and the rest of our system, since they will use the GCS in their developments. Another objective has been to increase the quality of the system, thanks to the fact that this framework constitutes a common knowledge base, allowing improvements to be cumulative and avoiding divergences that prevent us from making future changes with little effort.