DAQ

1
DAQ on-line monitoring at X5 (G. Aielli, P.
Camarri)

• DAQ realization and performance for RPC tests at
  X5-GIF.
• Adds and changes with respect to the July 2002
  version.

2
DAQ items

• PC Pentium II 400 MHz, RAM 128 MB.
• National Instruments interface PCI-VME-MXI-2.
• DAQ program developed with LabVIEW 6.0.2
• On-line monitor developed with LabVIEW as well.

3
DAQ front panel (old)
4
Acquisition procedure

1. Hexadecimal word readout from TDCs.
2. Data flag check.
3. If data flagTRUE, then the present TDC module
   readout continues till the empty buffer flag is
   found if the module contains no data, the hex
   word DEADCAFE is written to file. After that, the
   following TDC module is read out in the same way.
4. At the beginning of each event the event number
   is written to the data stream, starting from 1.
5. Once every fixed number of events (1000, for
   instance) the DCS data stream is read via LAN and
   written into the event data stream, between two
   hex control words.
6. The data are written to a binary file in the time
   interval between two spills (beam) or two
   triggers (cosmics).

5
DAQ performance during the July 2002 test

• Beam source off gt 3000 events/spill
• Beam source10 gt 2000 events/spill
• Beam source5 gt 1000 events/spill

6
On-line monitoring

• Binary file decoding, and production of an ASCII
  file containing a dump of a given number of
  events (Event number, TDC number, time, channel,
  DCS blocks, etc.).
• Display of time distribution histograms, hit
  profiles and strip multiplicity for each
  readout layer.

7
Comments

• The system has shown pretty satisfactory speed,
  reliability and robustness.
• Taken 107 events within 4 days data taking in
  July 2002.
• The system is scalable very simply to include a
  higher number of modules.

8
Developments

• Computation of single rates (done), DAQ-monitor
  synchronization (work in progress) and display of
  sample tracks (to be done).