Abstract

The Durham adaptive Optics Real Time Controller (DARC)(1) is a real-time system for astronomical adaptive optics systems originally developed at Durham University and in use for the CANARY instrument. One of its main strengths is to be a generic and high performance real-time controller running on an off-the-shelf Linux computer. We are using DARC for two different implementations: BEAGLE,(2) a Multi-Object AO (MOAO) bench system to experiment with novel tomographic reconstructors and LOTUCE2,(3) an in-dome turbulence instrument. We present the software architecture for each application, current benchmarks and lessons learned for current and future DARC developers.