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ANTARES is a neutrino telescope project based on strings of Cerenkov detectors in deep sea. These detectors are spread over a volume of 1 km3 at a depth of about 2 km in the Mediterranean Sea near Toulon. About 400 of such detectors are now operational, as well as a large variety of instruments that need a reliable and accurate embedded slow control system. Based on Commodity Off-the-Shelf (COTS) low-power integrated processors and industry standards such as Ethernet and ModBus, the foreseen system is expected to run for 3 years without any direct access to the hardware. We present the system architecture and some performance figures. The slow control system stores the state of the system at any time in a database. This state may be analyzed by technical staff in charge of the maintenance, physicists to check the setup of the experiment, or the data acquisition system for saving experimental conditions. The main functions of the slow control system are to give a record of the state of the whole system, to set the value of a parameter of a physical device, to modify the value of a parameter of a physical device, and to set up the initial values of the physical devices.
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