Revision as of 18:14, 4 August 2011

Agenda

Announcements
Review of minutes from 20-Jul-2011 meeting
DAQ group activities for Hall D - Bryan, Carl
Controls test stand status - Hovanes
Root-based server/client for monitoring ROCs - Sasha
Multi-crate trigger test - Bryan
Event size and raw event format - Dave, Carl
FDC cosmic ray test - Beni
Electronics, trigger and DAQ status reports - Chris, Alex, Dave, Fernando, Ben, Ed, William, Bryan
Mantis Task Tracker

1:30 PM Wed 3-Aug-2011 CC F326

No announcements

Next meeting is scheduled for 27 of August.

Dave Lorenz informed us that Dave Heddle is the chair of the math department at CNU and he will not have much time to work on the event viewer.
Andrew will work with him in implementing the 3D features he developed for Hall D into the core event viewer from CNU because Dave was impressed by the Andrews 3D display for Hall D. So Andrew will have to give up on some of his work on JAVA of the viewer and C++ event reconstruction without writing out EVIO files.
Dave may have another student to work on the event viewer.

Hovanes installed PLC and the programming software on the Windows box in the test area in Room 126.
VME/VXS crates have EPICS driver and it works well. This is the driver we will use in Hall D.
Hovanes tried the EPICS support from Canadian Light Source for CAEN x527 HV chassis. The driver only incorporates control of the channels, no board-wide or chassis-wide functionality. Also the code for the existing functionality does not seem to be final, some parameters are hard coded. This EPICS driver is an alternative to what Hall B has been using.
The problem with the PXE booting the new VME controllers has been resolved.

Carl had a discussion with other members of the DAQ group about the data formats and how to disentangle the data. The goal is to provide an example how to disentangle of the data. Carl has all the information to go ahead and do what he needs to do.

Bryan gave a short presentation on self-configuring readout list that gave the group the scope of the work he intends to work on. This is one of the tasks that Hall D asked DAQ to work on as a part of DAQ groups contribution into Hall D online activity.
The presentation lead to a long discussions with people expressing different opinions about the project. Everyone liked the feature of having automated identification of the board on the power up of the controller.

Mark and Sasha argued that auto-configured readout list will no be used often. The argument was that Hall D will probably like to configure the ROL themselves and load it. The values from the scan at the controller boot-up can be used for checking at the download time to identify inconsistencies with the preconfigured readout list.
Dave informed the group that Primex actually did use such a feature often of Hall D DAQ during their run.
Beni and Hovanes thought that creating such feature will be useful anyway and can lead to useful follow-up activities.
Carl mentioned that he talked Ed about using three bits in the header from some of the bits that are still are available to identify the board type directly from the data.
It was also pointed out that other groups will use this feature as well.

We concluded that a small number of people from Hall D need to meet and discuss the issue of how important such a feature will be for data taking and analyzing the data.

We still do not have a new FADC module. This starts interfering with the progress of planned activities.
Sasha developed a graphical interface to display information (scalers, energies) from the FADC. He is simulating the server part. Client successfully is sending and receiving messages. There is an intention to use c-message framework to send the information instead of using the ROOT framework.
Sasha also has a server from Sergey which allows to send commands to the ROC in the case of the Linux-based VME/VXS controller where there is no VxWorks shell to call functions. The utility allows to send commands from remote hosts, the server receives the command name, searches in the list of the function names and executes it. This allows to change parameters on the fly. Also this system registers ports for each server in the database so that the client can find the right port to send the to commands.

Beni can read now 7 TDCs at the same time. It seems to work fine.
Beni is using VxWork for the first crate he is using now. He will use another crate and will use one of the new Linux-based controllers.

Revision as of 18:13, 4 August 2011 (view source) Hovanes (Talk \| contribs) (→‎FDC Cosmic test) ← Older edit		Revision as of 18:14, 4 August 2011 (view source) Hovanes (Talk \| contribs) (→‎FDC Cosmic test) Newer edit →
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	* Beni can read now 7 TDCs at the same time. It seems to work fine.		* Beni can read now 7 TDCs at the same time. It seems to work fine.
		+	* Beni is using VxWork for the first crate he is using now. He will use another crate and will use one of the new Linux-based controllers.