A low-cost and duplicable portable solar adaptive optics system based on LabVIEW hybrid programming

We have developed a portable solar adaptive optics (PSAO) for diffraction-limited imaging based on today’s multi-core personal computer. Our PSAO software is written in LabVIEW code, which features block-diagram function based programming and can dramatically speed up the software development. The PSAO can achieve a ~1000 Hz open-loop correction speed with a Shack–Hartmann Wave-front Sensor (SH-WFS) in 11 × 11 sub-aperture configuration. The image shift measurements for solar wave-front sensing are the most time-consuming computations in a solar adaptive optics (AO) system. Since our current LabVIEW program does not fully support multi-core techniques for the image shift measurements, it cannot fully take advantage of the multi-core computer’s power for parallel computation. In order to accelerate the AO system’s running speed, a dedicated message passing interface/open multi-processing parallel programming technique is developed for our LabVIEW-based AO program, which fully supports multi-core parallel computation in LabVIEW programming. Our experiments demonstrate that the hybrid parallel technique can significantly improve the running speed of the solar AO system, and this work paves the way for the applications of a low-cost and duplicable PSAO system for large solar telescopes.