Albin Engineering Services, Inc. (www.aesi.com) has an immediate requirement for an Controls Technician or Engineer to support the hardware and software control electronics for XRAY experiments at our client's facility in Palo Alto, CA. This position will be for a five (5) month term, with a possibility of transitioning to a direct position.

PLEASE READ JOB DESCRIPTION CAREFULLY BEFORE SENDING RESUME (.DOC format only)

We are looking for a Controls Technician or Engineer who understands commercial controllers and can program them on a platform partly real-time operating system, and some LINUX. We are NOT looking for a electronics circuit or board designer, but somebody who uses commercial controller hardware (PLC, VME IO modules, terminal servers) to control and readout commercial hardware (motors, vacuum gauges, valves, power supplies, amplifiers) talking via serial interface, interface from VME plug-in modules, other manufacturer specific buses. The controllers are programmed via the EPICS control software and are VME Motorola processor boards, or Allen Bradley control software. Processors run RTEMS real-time operating system. Many items are also controlled from computer running the LINUX operating system.

The control consists mainly of:
A) Vacuum: MKS ion gauge controllers, ion pump controllers, programmable logic controllers (Allen-Bradley and Automation Direct PLC's)
B) Viewing: video cameras connected to either VME-based PMC cards mounted on VME Motorola CPU boards (CASCADE 512b, Pulnix 6720CL)
C) Motion: Hytek Motor control chassis to control and read back stepper motors, Highland LVDT readback, solenoid-controller chassis with interface to Acromag Industry-Pack mounted on VME IP carrier board
D) Monitoring: Beckhoff temperature monitoring instrumentation
E) Power supplies: VME-based ISEG high-voltage modules and chassis-based low-voltage supplies

All of the above is controlled via:
- VME-based Motorola CPU boards running the open-source RTEMS real-time operating system
- Linux based cPCI blades running soft Input-Output-Control processes (IOCs)
- Linux based DELL computers running soft IOCs
- Part of the system is terminal servers to provide serial-ports for the controllers from Ethernet. The CPU's run processing algorithms to process the raw data to provide output to the scientists
- Control software used is EPICS

PROJECT TASKS
The contractor’s main focus during this period will be on the following:
- Get familiar with the control hardware and software
- Needs to be controls contact for all hardware/software issues and take care them
- Modify, maintain, trouble-shoot hardware at the system level (determining the cause of a problem and replacing components as cables, controllers, commercial modules)
- Maintain, trouble-shoot software (ex: determining the cause of a sub-system not responding, reinitializing the CPU possible going in via serial debug port)
- Modify software running on CPU