Cora - a new control program for the roma detection system

A new computer program has been developed for the control of the GSI Rotating Wheel Multi Detector Apparatus (ROMA) running under the Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 operating systems. It can be fitted to a lot of detection tasks in a highly flexible way.

The ROMA apparatus [1] has been used successfully for a lot of chemical investiga-tions of transactinide elements. In preparation of our seaborgium experiment at GSI in sum-mer 1998 [2] we developed a new control program. This was necessary because the old control code was running on an ATARI computer. In case of a damage of this computer, there would not have been the possibility of a replacement, which could possibly cancel the experiment.
The new program was designed to fulfill our special experimental requirements. A second feature is its support of the usual working conditions in a long running beam time. That means, persons without a deep understanding of a computer should be able to use this program without any difficulties, even if the programmer is not available. Thirdly, it should be highly flexible in order to adapt it to new experimental demands. Finally, the program should be to a great extent independent of the experiment hardware in order to be usable for similar apparatuses.
The program is written entire-ly in the C++ language using the Borland C++ Builder 1.0 programming environment based on the object oriented Virtual Component Library.

The program has to carry out the following tasks:

· control of the ROMA wheel movements according to the actual experiment;
· enabling and disabling the nuclear spectros-copy data acquisition;
· sending information about the actual ROMA status to the data acquisition hardware;
· processing requests of the acquisition hardware (e. g. switching in "daughter mode" [3]);
· processing user input (e. g. experiment and wheel setup dialog boxes).

The program is a Microsoft Windows applicatio ...