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The 20th IEEE-NPSS Real Time Conference, RT2016, Padua, Italy, 5 Jun 2016 - 10 Jun 2016 ; 1-4(2016)., The MicroTCA.4 crate standard provides a powerful electronic platform for digital and analogue signal processing. Besides excellent hardwaremodularity,it is the software reliability and flexibility as well as the easy integration into existing software infrastructures that will drive the widespread adoption of the standard.The DESY MicroTCA.4 User Tool Kit (MTCA4U) is a collection of C++ libraries which facilitate the development of control applications. The device access library allows convenient access to hardware with an extensible register based interface. Starting from PCI Express, which is used inside a MicroTCA.4 crate, the introduction of new, network based protocols extends its reach beyond a single crate and even MircoTCA itself.Features like register name mapping and automatic type conversion provide a level of abstraction which makes the software robust against firmwareand even hardware changes. Bindings to widely used scripting tools likeMatlab and Python as well as a graphical user interface complete the protfolio needed for fast prototyping and firmware development.We give an update on the project status and present new features which have recently been introduced or are currently being implemented.

The MicroTCA.4 crate standard provides a powerful electronic platform for digital and analogue signal processing.Besides excellent hardware modularity, it is the software reliability and flexibility as well as the easy integration into existing Software infrastructures that will drive the widespread adoption of the new standard. The DESY MicroTCA.4 User Tool Kit (MTCA4U) comprises three main components: A Linux device driver, a C++ API for accessing the MicroTCA. 4 devices and a control system interface layer. Themain focus of the tool kit is flexibility to enable fast development. The universal, expandable PCIexpress driver and a register mapping library allow out of the box Operation of all MicroTCA.4 devices which carry firmware developed with the DESY FPGA board support package. The controlsystem adapter provides callback functions to decouple the application code from the middleware layer. Like this the same business logic can be used at different facilities without further modification.

Optical laser have become an integral part of free-electron laser facilities for the purposes of electron bunch generation, external seeding, diagnostics and pump-probe experiments. The ultra-short electron bunches demand a high timing stability and precision synchronization of the optical lasers. In this paper, we present the proof-of-principle for a laser locking application implemented on a MTCA.4 platform. The system design relies on existing MTCA.4 compliant off-the-shelf modules that are available on the market or have been developed for other applications within the particle accelerator community. Besides performance and cost, we also tried to minimize the number of out-of-crate components. Preliminary measurements of laser locking at the FLASH and REGAE particle accelerators are presented, and an outlook for further system development in the area of laser-to-RF synchronization is given.

Free-electron lasers, like FLASH and the upcoming European XFEL, are capable of producing XUV and X-ray pulses of a few femtoseconds duration. For time-resolved pump-probe experiments and the externally seeded operation mode it is crucial not only to stabilize the arrival time of the electron bunches, but also to achieve a synchronization accuracy of external lasers on the same timescale. This can only be realized with a laser-based synchronization infrastructure. At FLASH, a periodic femtosecond laser pulse train is transmitted over actively stabilized optical fibers to the critical subsystems. In this paper we report on the present status and performance of the system, as well as its imminent upgrades and new installations. These include the connection of FLASH2, electron bunch arrival time monitors for low charges, a new master laser pulse distribution scheme, all-optical synchronization of the pump-probe laser and arrival time measurements of the UV pulses on the e-gun photocathode. Along with the coming connection of the acceleration modules to the master laser and the switch of the low-level hardware to the uTCA platform, an outlook to improved feedback strategies is given.