1. Operation

All cacao commands and scrpts are run from the loop root directory, and an error message will be returned if they are not.

2. Calibrations

2.1. Calibration Files

Calibration files are stored in conf/ subdirectory of the loop root directory.

• The curent working files (input and output of scripts) are stored as FITS files, such as dmmask.fits.
• These are the key input and output of most cacao scripts.
• Configuration files, when uploaded to shared memory, are also copied to shmim.sname.fits file, which sname the name of the shared memory (without the aolX_ prefix).

2.2. Calibration scripts

By default cacao scripts will upload results in shared memory and archieved to the logdir directory. This allows for quick operation, not having to run separate commands for compute and upload, and performs automatic archival.

2.3. Managing multiple calibrations

With the environment variable CACAO_CONFWDIR set, the configuration working directory (default conf) will be changed to CACAO_CONFWDIR.

In this example, a custom set of control modes is computed and stored in directory conftest1. At the end of this example, the resulting control modes are loaded to shared memory:

# All commands executed from LOOPROOTDIR
# Create new configuration directory
mkdir -p conftest1

# Copy zonal RM from main configuration
cp ./conf/zrespM.fits ./conftest1/


# Have all cacao scripts below work in conftest1
export CACAO_CONFWDIR="conftest1"

# Create Zernike-Fourier modes
cacao-aorun-028-mkZFmodes -c0 0 -c1 32 -c 50 -ea 2.0 -t 1.0 -a 0.3
# output:
# conftest1/RMmodesDM/modesZF0.fits (not apodized)
# conftest1/RMmodesDM/modesZF.fits (apodized)

# Create the corresponding response
cacao-aorun-034-RMzonal2modal modesZF
# output:
# conftest1/RMmodesDM.fits (sym link to input modesZF.fits)
# conftest1/RMmodesWFS.fits

# Compute the corresponding control matrix using the by-block algorithm
cacao-aorun-045-compCM-byblocks 0.1 1
# output:
# conftest1/CMmodesDM.fits
# conftest1/CMmodesDM.fits

# Load the CM to shared memory, copy to main conf and log
cacao-aorun-042-loadCM

2.4. User scripts

User calibration scripts should be stored in conf/scripts/

2.2. Archived Files

Most cacao scripts save their output in archive in directory logdir which may be a symlink to outside the LOOPROOTDIR.

Files are archieved with the cacao-calib-logFITSfile function (part of cacaofuncs-log), which will take as argument the NAME, and copy file conf/NAME.fits to logdir/aol_LOOPNAME/NAME/NAME.DATESTRING.fits.