Rapid prototyping of the Large Millimeter Telescope monitor and control system for effective user interface design

The monitor and control system of a telescope must provide users with a way to control certain values in the system and view other constantly changing values. Users may also want to loo, system values to a database and chart changes to numerical values in real time. The components of a telescope system may change and instruments may be added and removed. The set of values that the monitor and control system must provide access to may therefore change. The challenge is to provide a flexible monitor and control system to accommodate changes to the system. The Large Millimeter Telescope monitor and control system is automatically generated from a set of XML configuration files. Because the code for the system's software objects is generated automatically it is easy to include in the generated code sufficient information about the objects to inform the display. This paper will present monitor, control, logging and charting tools that automatically change to reflect changes in the components and properties of the system. These tools depend on generating software objects that include information about their own fields.