Welcome to SICS-MAD! SICS-MAD is the SINQ solution for running triple axis spectrometers. The name consists of two parts: SICS is the SINQ Instrument Control System. MAD is mad. It is a compatability layer on top of SICS which emulates the command set and behaviour of the venerable MAD software from the ILL.
SICS is a client server system. This means there is a magic server program running on the instrument computer which does all the work. The user interacts with SICS only with client applications which communicate with the server through the network. Most instrument hardware (motor controllers, counter boxes etc.) is connected to the system through RS-232 serial connections. These RS-232 ports are connected to a terminal server which is accessed through another server program, the SerPortServer program, which is also running on the instrument computer. The SICS server communicates with the terminal server and other devices through the network.
The MAD compatibility layer is implemented in the SICS server. Most MAD commands were mapped to their SICS equivalents through procedures written in SICS internal scripting language. Some crucial operations, such as driving and scanning, were implemented in C, sometimes even using F77 routines from the ILL MAD sources for performing the triple axis calculations.
SICS clients are small programs which implement the user interface to the SICS server. Clients connect to the SICS server through the TCP/IP network and display the instrument status or allow to control the instrument. Of interest to the triple axis spectrometer user are the dedicated TAS client, named tas, the general SICS comand line client, sics, and the variable watcher, varwatch, which allows to plot any SICS variable as a function of time. All clients are java applications and can be run from any computer for which a JDK1.1 compatible Java runtime system is available.