I want to make a short report on DC high voltage control software
readiness and reliability.
The first version of the DCHV software is ready to be released.
It passes all check tests with the real DC high voltage setup.
The DC high voltage control software has two major parts : the low
level driver for V288 VME CAENET controller and a graphical user
interface on the top of the low level software.
Driver:
=======
Low level software is written entirely on C and is about 700 line code,
including all basic CAEN ( different systems: SY527 , SY463,...)
control functions. The driver code is reasonably simple to guarant
robustness of the control system. The low level driver is compiled
with vxworks cross compiler and down-loaded in to the VME board computer
MVME162-CROC25.
GUI:
====
GUI is written entirely on TCL/TK ( more then 3000 line code) and is
responsible for setting and analyzing of
the CAEN data, database management and visualization.
Software organization:
======================
The main directory has following architecture:
gui/ dbase/ mondat/ setdat/
dbase/ includes configuration files for different types of DC channel
groupings.
Here is an example of the configuration file, which simply contains the
name,coded_name, crate_number, board_number and channel_number of the DC
high voltage channel.
R3S5AXF0912 35211 4 3 20
R3S5AXF1316 35212 4 3 21
R3S5STF0912 35221 4 3 12
R3S5STF1316 35222 4 3 13
R3S5AXS0912 35231 4 7 20
R3S5AXS1316 35232 4 7 21
R3S5STS0912 35241 4 7 12
R3S5STS1316 35242 4 7 13
R3S5AXG0916 35251 4 9 15
R3S5STG0916 35261 4 9 14
mondat/ and setdat/ are used for temporary keeping the monitored and
saved "set" high voltage parameters respectively.
gui/ contains the main TCL scripts and some utility scripts for
accessing the low level driver.
features.tcl proginit.tcl tgraph.ps snapshot.h
bindings.tcl global.h set_mon* tagmasiv.h
dchv* paramview.tcl* set_par*
dchv is the main executable.
tgraph.ps is the one of the outputs of the program, which is the ps
file of the time history plot of the monitored current sums.
It is important to mention that the main hardware database is stored in
the CAEN hardware, with safe power_off protection. This is a essential
solution since in this case we are guaranteed that the database is
always consistent with what we are going to have actually on the DC.
Reliability:
===========
The parts of the software was tested in electronics lab, on the test
CAEN setup. The entire version of the program was intensively
tested during this precommisioning week in hall B, including two night
continues stability tests of monitoring of the complete DC channels with
time interval of 10 sec. During all this test period there were no
evidence of the software crashe ( I will prefer to have some of them
:-)).
Three times we get the situation, when the VME board computer with
the v288 vme controller hangs.!!!
During this night I made a several test hoping to find out the reason
of this problem. And I find it :-)
The VME control system hangs always when the native CAEN control is
doing an active action. ex. change the crate from the vt320
terminal, monitor or set some parameters using this native CAEN software,
etc.
Only the way to recover the VME control system is to go to hall and
manually reset the croc25.
Conclusion:
==========
VME control system can not function simultaneously with the CAEN native
software!
With best regards,
Vardan
P.S. Since we had several demos of the program I will write the
documentation right after successful start of the commissioning run.