ESPRESSO Instrument Control Electronics and Software: Final Phases Before the Installation in Chile

ESPRESSO, the Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet and Stable Spectroscopic Observations, is undergoing the final testing phases before being shipped to Chile and installed in the Combined Coudé Laboratory (CCL) at the ESO Very Large Telescope site. The integration of the instrument takes place at the Astronomical Observatory of Geneva. It includes the full tests of the Instrument Control Electronics (ICE) and Instrument Control Software (ICS), designed and developed at the INAF-Astronomical Observatory of Trieste. ESPRESSO is the first ESO-VLT permanent instrument which electronics is based on Beckhoff PLCs. Two PLC CPUs shares all the workload of the ESPRESSO functions and through the OPC-UA protocol the PLC communicates with the instrument control software based on VLT control software package. In this phase all the devices and subsystems of ESPRESSO are installed, connected together and verified, mimicking the final working conditions in Chile. This paper will summarize the features of the ESPRESSO control system, the tests performed during the integration in Europe and the main performance obtained before the integration of the whole instrument "on sky" in South America.
Proceedings of the 16th Int. Conf. on Accelerator and Large Experimental Control Systems, ICALEPCS2017, Barcelona, Spain