The Herzberg Extensible Adaptive Real-time Toolkit (HEART) is a collection of libraries and other software components developed at the Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre (HAA) to control multiple types of Adaptive Optics (AO) systems. The HEART RTC design has two main components: the Hard Real-Time RTC (HRT), which includes all the time-critical high-speed processing tasks; and the Soft Real-Time RTC (SRT), which includes the nontime critical tasks such as optimizations, AO parameter updates, and diagnostics. HEART was used to create the REVOLT RTC (Research, Experiment, and Validation of Adaptive Optics with a Legacy Telescope), a single conjugate AO (SCAO) system, for the HAA’s 1.2-m telescope. This paper presents significant aspects of HEART that were successfully tested with REVOLT, either in the daytime testing or on-sky. Highlights include specialized functionality of the HRT such as uncontrolled mode cleanup, power spectra of the high-order vector, and pseudo-open loop feedback. Also highlighted are the recent design of the ELT Andes (ArmazoNes high Dispersion Echelle Spectrograph) SCAO RTC, which is a pixel based reconstructor. Core SRT operations such as reconstructor generation and optimization were also demonstrated. Presentation of results from these test runs make use of our HEART Analysis (HEART-ANA) package.
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