A Macintosh Quadra 950 controls the wires' movement using a Nubus motor controller card. In a VME crate, controlled through a MXI interface, digi- tizers sample the beam loss signals on each turn of the beam. The LabVIEW program reads the data in and analyzes the pro- files to determine the emittance of the beam. Work is in progress to speed up analysis and create a console application to present the results to the operators. Because LabVIEW is a graphical language, one is saved the time normally spent debugging syntax errors.
Additional time is saved by the availability of many drivers for the data acquisi- tion hardware.
Very little time is spent on the display or communication at the Macintosh side due to the built-in graphics. Thus by using available hardware and the LabVIEW software, we found that most time, up to eighty percent, is spent on programming the analysis routines and the control flow of the program. Besides the availability of LabVIEW for the Macintosh other useful utilities are available as well, e.g., screen snap- shot takers, installer programs, and remote control programs. A disadvantage of the Macintosh is the lack of a real-time kernel. The main factor that alleviates this lack is that our ap- plications are geared towards monitoring, not controlling.