This is the home page of TACO - the object oriented control system originally developed at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility to control accelerators and beamlines and data acquisition systems. At the ESRF TACO is used to control  three accelerators - linear accelerator , booster synchrotron and storage ring, and over 30 beamlines. TACO is being used for instrument control for the new  neutron source ( FRM-II) in Garching-Munich (Germany). Take a look at the FRM-II TACO home page for a list of servers and modifications they have made to TACO. TACO has been applied to telescope control at the 26m radio telescope at the Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory (South Africa). TACO is very scalable and can be used for simple single device laboratory like setups with only a few devices or for a big installation comprising thousands of devices. TACO is a cheap and simple solution for doing distributed home automation. TACO is available free of charge without warranties.

TACO is object oriented because it treats ALL (physical and logical) control points in a control system as objects in a distributed environment. All actions are implemented in classes. New classes can be constructed out of existing classes in a hierarchical manner thereby ensuring a high-level of software reuse. Classes can be written in C++, in C (using a methodology called Objects in C), in Python or in LabView (using G).

TACO has been designed to be portable and runs on a large number of platforms (e.g. Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, Windows/NT,  Windows/95, OS9).

TO FIND OUT ABOUT TANGO (inspired by  TACO but based on CORBA) VISIT THE TANGO web site