Hardware Abstraction Layer

Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL)

The Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) provides Agent Command Interpreters with access to hardware drivers for managing real-time hardware operations.

When an RPC command request is received, agent command interpreters often need to interact with real-time hardware devices to perform tasks such as local device and link calibration or entanglement generation.

HAL reads the real-time hardware configuration from a configuration file and dynamically initializes a driver within its object instance. This instance is then passed to the command interpreter during its initialization.

Device Configuration

Device configurations are specified under the [devices] section in the configuration file and require the following parameters:

enabled : bool - Enables or disables the device
type : Specifies the device type, which must be one of the following classes: LightSrc, Filter, LightMeasurement, SignalMeasurement, AnalogController, DigitalController, ExpFramework
driver : Name of the driver class to be initialized
Additional items are passed as dictionary parameters to the driver constructor when initialized

Example Device Configuration:

[devices]
[[exp_framework]]
enabled = true
type = Exp_Framework
driver = ArtiqClient
host = ::1
port = 3251

[[lightsource]]
enabled = true
type = Light_Source
driver = overlay
device = /dev/ttyACM0
baud_rate = 9600
bsm_ip = 10.0.0.7
bsm_port = 55180

[[epc]]
enabled = true
type = Filter
driver = DummyEPC

[[polarimeter]]
enabled = true
type = Light_Measurement
driver = Thorlabs
device = /dev/usbtmc0

[[egp]]
enabled = true
type = EGP
driver = SimEGPDriver
protocol = EGProtocol

[[messaging]]
enabled = true
type = Messaging
driver = PassthroughDriver