Welcome to the reflectometer AMOR at SINQ! This manual describes how to operate AMOR through the SICS instrument control software. SICS means: Sinq Instrument Control System. AMOR can be operated in one out of two modes:
SICS is a client server system. This means there is a magic server program running on the instrument computer which does all the work. The user interacts with SICS only with client applications which communicate with the server through the network. Most instrument hardware (motor controllers, counter boxes etc.) is connected to the system through RS-232 serial connections. These RS-232 ports are connected to a terminal server which is accessed through another server program, the SerPortServer program, which is also running on the instrument computer. Then there is the position sensitive detector. Neutrons collected in the PSD are formatted into a special message format by the elctronics and forwarded through a fibre optic link to the histogram memory computer. This is a VME Motorola on board computer which then is responsible for summing the neutrons events appropriatetly. The on board computer is connected to the TCP/IP network and acts as a server as well which handles the configuration and readout of the histogram memory. The SICS server communicates with this terminal server and other devices through the network.