Abstract
SNS is currently in progress of a multi-year plan to ramp ion beam power to the initial design power of 1.4 MW. Key to reaching this goal is understanding and improving the operation of the H- ion source. An Allison scanner was installed on the ion source test stand to support this improvement. This paper will discuss the hardware and the software control system of the installed Allison scanner. The hardware for the system consists of several parts. The heart of the system is the scanner head, complete with associated bias plates, slits, and signal detector. There are two analog controlled high voltage power supplies to bias the plates in the head, and a motor with associated controller to position the head in the beam. A multifunction data acquisition card reads the signals from the signal detector, as well as supplying the analog voltage control for the power supplies. To synchronize data acquisition with the source, the same timing signal that is used to trigger the source itself is used to trigger data acquisition. Finally, there is an industrial PC to control the rest of the hardware. Control software was developed using National Instruments LabVIEW, and consists of two parts, a data acquisition program to control the hardware, and a stand alone application for offline user data analysis.
