A 37-element solar adaptive optics system, which consists of a fine tracking loop with a tip/tilt mirror and a correlation tracker, and a high-order correction loop with a 37-element deformable mirror, a correlating Shack–Hartmann wavefront sensor, and a real-time controller, was built and installed at the $26\mathrm{cm}$ solar fine structure telescope of the Yunnan Astronomical Observatory in 2009. In this system, the absolute difference algorithm is used. A new architecture with field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and digital signal processor (DSP) for the real-time controller based on systolic array and pipeline was developed. The computational latencies of the fine tracking loop and high-order correction loop are about $35$ and $100\mu s$ , respectively. The tracking residual root-mean-square error is less than $0.1\mathrm{arcsec}$ , and the wavefront residual root-mean-square error is about 0.05 wavelengths ( $\lambda =550\mathrm{nm}$ ) after correction. The observational results show that the contrast and resolution of the solar images are improved after the correction by this adaptive optics system.