TANGO – Making equipment remotely controllable

Usually hardware vendors ship some end user application for Microsoft Windows and drivers for their hardware. Sometimes there are generic application like coriander for firewire cameras. While this is often enough most of these solutions are not remotely controllable. Some of our clients use multiple devices and equipment to conduct their experiments which must be orchestrated to achieve the desired results. This is where TANGO – an open source software (OSS) control system framework – comes into play.

Most of the time hardware also can be controlled using a standardized or proprietary protocol and/or a vendor library. TANGO makes it easy to expose the desired functionality of the hardware through a well-defined and explorable interface consisting of attributes and commands. Such an interface to hardware –  or a logical piece of equipment completely realised in software – is called a device in TANGO terms.

Devices are available over the (intra)net and can be controlled manually or using various scripting systems. Integrating your hardware as TANGO devices into the control system opens up a lot of possibilites in using and monitoring your equipment efficiently and comfortably using TANGO clients. There are a lot of bindings for TANGO devices if you do not want to program your own TANGO client in C++, Java or Python, for example LabVIEW, Matlab, IGOR pro, Panorama and WinCC OA.

So if you have the need to control several pieces of hardware at once have a look at the TANGO framework. It features

• network transparency
• platform-indepence (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X etc.) and -interoperability
• cross-language support(C++, Java and Python)
• a rich set of tools and frameworks

There is a vivid community around TANGO and many drivers for different types of equipment already exist as open source projects for different types of cameras, a plethora of motion controllers and so on. I will provide a deeper look at the concepts with code examples and guidelines building for TANGO devices in future posts.