A new real-time operating system and Python scripting on Aladdin

We are in the process of upgrading the VME processors on the Aladdin electron-storage-ring control system. The last major redesign of the control system occurred in the mid 1980´s. At that time we converted to VME microcomputers and VAX/VMS workstations communicating via Ethernet. This is the second upgrade since then of the VME processor. As upgrades of the Motorola 680×0 processor are no longer available we have decided to switch to the Intel Pentium III. This change allowed us to reconsider our use of the rather primitive μC/OS kernel and implement a commercial realtime OS. We decided to use QNX primarily as it was a good match to our existing software and was zero cost. In addition to upgrading the CPUs we have also added a new scripting language to our main control application. We used SWIG (Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator) to create wrapper code for the scripting software. SWIG can create wrapper code for many scripting languages so our initial choice of a scripting language was not critical. We decided to start by using Python due to the many available add-on libraries and the apparent ability to support larger projects. We will discuss our evaluation process and the challenges we encountered.