Wednesday October 6, 2004

Today and tonight the priority was in getting the DDU/DCC stress
tested. Unfortunately, some critical issues with the DMB took pretty
much the lions share of the expert's attention. In summary these were
the issues(in order of criticality)  and their solutions:
  1) the TTC sync_reset was passed to the DMB was passed on to the
     CFEBs. The sync_reset is issued every spill and resets the CFEBs
     causing them to loose their settings after one spill.
     --> Jianhui identified this problem and prepared firmware updates
         for the DAQMBs which prevent the signal from being passed to
         the CFEBs
  2) the network hub for the local dynatem work got misconfigured when
     adding the 4th peripheral crate. Accidentally, geurts2.cern.ch
     was hooked in the uplink port, which was the only non-used port
     at the hub.
     --> we added a 2nd hub and taped off the uplink port of the hub
         to prevent accidental hook-ups.
  3) the xml parser in the peripheralcrate control software does not
     allow crate and vme ids that are not +1 incremental. If in the 
     configuration  a crate=0 is followed by a crate=2 instead of
     crate=1 the parsing becomes unstable and unpredictable. This
     turned out to be particularly annoying during debugging sessions
     were often complete crates get commented out.
     --> indentified bug. This will be solved after this test beam
         period.

A planned DCS session had to be postponed to allow the experts to
further debug the above mentioned DMB issues.

During the day the RPC crew finished the installation of their
chambers. Three RE1/2 chambers are now positioned together with the CSCs:
two are on a special mount behind our ME3/2 chamber and one is mounted
on ME1/2. Life support (HV/LV/gas) is hooked up and apart from the LV
is running. You can find  summary below:

<Archana's summary>
  Dear colleagues,
   1.  3 RPC chambers are in the beam: 
   
                   1 RE1/2 mated with CSC
                   1 RE1/2 and 
                    a third RE1/2
                     (NOT RE1/3 as planned)
   
   2. The chambers are on the RPC gas system, a mix of Freon,
      Isobutane and SF6. (No water)
   
   3. HV, LV and Skew Clear cables are strung, and tested with HV upto
     9 kV. Only central sectors, B1 and B2, of each chamber are
     connected, given the beam size. 
   
   4. Presently the chambers are on 2kV. We are ready to ramp up the
     voltage when desired. 
   
   A LOG BOOK (blue folder) is placed on top of our electronics rack,
   kindly make an entry if you change any configuration.  
   [...]
</Archana's summary>


Stan's DCC reader code is tested in the famous
"little program that could" HardwareDumper and was able to produce
valid DCC data through the S-Link. HardwareDumper uses the same
DDUReadout routines as the EmuRUI does so inclusion in the EMU DAQ
stream should be straightforward.

On the SPRUI front a lot of progress has been made by Rick W.
and Bobby. The software should be ready and hopefully can be included
in tomorrows extended HCAL+EMU testing. An SP alternative to the
HardwareDumper is remotely being worked on by Lindsey.

The graveyard shift is dedicated to DDU/DCC testing, and tomorrow
morning we will continue our DAQ integration with HCAL, this time
running for more extended periods. After 4pm the HCAL crew will turn
to their low-energy pion scans at which point both DAQs will decouple
again.

In parallel we hope to implement Jan Troska's suggestion to measure the BXNs
through the SP by reimplementing Lev's firmware.