• F. Spinella, F. Bedeschi, S. Galeotti, A. Gennai, E. Pedreschi
  INFN-Pisa, Pisa
• A. Basti, D. Passuello
  University of Pisa and INFN, Pisa

Active devices based on piezoelectric actuators are widely used to dump unwanted vibrations in a variety of applications; for instance fast tuners for superconducting RF cavities. In another poster, we describe a low cost modular system of drivers for piezoelectric actuators developed at INFN-Pisa; we show here that the same system can easily be extended, with the inclusion of a simple plug-in board, to include sufficient I/O and computing capability to allow control of the device up to frequencies in the kHz range. This implementation is extremely cost effective and can be used in all situations where a high granularity distributed control system is desirable. We also show our first test results obtained using this system to control a warm single cell 1.3 GHz cavity. The cavity is perturbed using a piezoelectric actuator to generate random noise, while another piezo is used in the control loop to stabilize the resonance frequency. We use the phase of the RF pickup from the cavity as a measure of the deviation from the resonance caused by the perturbation. This simple setup allows to easily test various control algorithms without the need to work at large complex facilities.