Fast controls for the WITCH Penning trap radioactive source experiment

The WITCH experiment will for the first time use a dedicated Penning trap as a radioactive source. By combining this with a retardation spectrometer, general access is opened to the β-recoil energy observable, which allows, e.g. to test the validity of the V-A form of the weak interaction. A system of specialized electronics with accompanying networked software control system has been developed for WITCH. Herein is given a short overview of the general control system and details about the electronic as well as software components special for the fast control of this Penning-trap-plus-spectrometer set-up.