P.J. Young, M. Brooks, S.J. Meatheringham, W.H. Roberts
Mount Stromlo and Siding Spring Observatories
CICADA - Computerised Instrument Control and Data Acquisition is a software system for control of telescope instruments in a distributed computing environment. It is designed using object-oriented techniques and built with standard computing tools such as RPC, SysV IPC, Posix threads, Tcl and GUI builders. The system is readily extensible to new instruments and currently supports the Astromed 3200 CCD controller and MSSSO's new tiptilt system. Work is currently underway to provide support for the SDSU CCD controller and MSSSO's Double Beam Spectrograph. A core set of processess handle common communication and control tasks, while specific instruments are ``bolted'' on using C++ inheritance techniques. Cicada offers consistent user interface, image display, data archiving and quick-look analysis for a variety of instruments.