GSI TRB3

TRB3 is an FPGA-TDC board made and sold by GSI. It can achieve ~20ps timing resolution

Documentation

Main TRB documentation

Computer Setup Instructions

Currently have gotten this working on an Opensuse machine.

We setup TRB3 on a private network. So need machine with second ethernet port.

Currently the work is being done with user trb3_user on computer daq14. This is a local user on that computer; not part of DAQ cluster.

Full instructions to be written

Start-up Instructions

These are the basic instructions to initialize and take data from TRB3, using the GSI DAQ tools.

1) Start the trb3 program and initialize the TRB3

cd /home/tbr3_user/trbsoft/daqtools/users/triumf_trb171
source startup.sh

2) Start webbrowser: In new terminal, do

cd /home/tbr3_user/trbsoft/daqtools/web/
./cts_gui --noopenxterm --port=1234 --endpoint=0xc001

open webbrowser and go to

http://daq14.triumf.ca:1234/

3) Start event builder: In new terminal, do

cd trbsoft/daqtools/users/triumf_trb171/
 dabc_exe TdcEventBuilder.xml

4) Enable the readout of the channels we want.

i) Go to webpage

http://daq14.triumf.ca:1234/tdc/tdc.htm

ii) Under 'board' set it to 0100.

iii) Then click 'enable' radio button

iv) Then, under 0100 set all the channel groups to on. Should then start seeing triggers for different channels (if we have signals going into channels).

v) Finally, disable the trigger window on the same page. On the section c801 click off and make sure it says 'disabled'. If trigger window is disabled then all triggers are accepted...

Doing TDC analysis

This is how we do the TDC analysis using the GSI tools:

A) Setup the analyzer

source ~/trbsoft/trb3/trb3login 

(This needs to be run in any terminal where you want to run the go4analysis

B) Create the set of calibration constants for the TDC

cd /home/tbr3_user/trbsoft/daqtools/users/triumf_trb171
rm cal*.cal  (remove old calibration files)
export CALTRIG=1; export CALMODE=-1;
go4analysis -number 100000 -user /data/trb3_data/saved/pulser17342114715.hld

(need to change this to use the hld file that you want to use)

The resulting calibration files are called something like cal_010X.cal. CALTRIG=1 means using trigger type 1 to do calibration. You can set this to different trigger type number, if required.

C) Now analyze more events, using those calibration files

rm *root
export CALTRIG=1; export CALMODE=0;
go4analysis -number 1000000 -user /data/trb3_data/saved/pulser17342114715.hld

now open the resulting root file

root -l Go4AutoSave.root

and use TBrowser() to look at the difference histogram. In particular, right now we look at the histogram TDC_0100/Ch3/TDC_0100_Ch3_RisingRef which shows the difference between the two synchronized input channels. This distribution should show a timing resolution between the hits of ~18ps if all the TDC calibration is working fine...

TRB3 MIDAS implementation

We have a working MIDAS readout of the TRB3 TDC data. Currently this readout uses a lot of the original GSI tools for setting up the TRB3 before the readout can start. At this time you need to do all the steps described in "Start up instructions" in order to setup the TRB3 before starting the MIDAS frontend. Eventually we will try to remove as many as possible of the original GSI tools.

MIDAS frontend code is available here:

|https://bitbucket.org/ttriumfdaq/trb3_frontend%7C

The MIDAS frontend is setup to read events from the DABC event builder, which makes the events available on port 6789. You can see a running MIDAS TRB3 frontend here:

|https://daq14.triumf.ca:8443%7C

I added simple decoder and histograming classes to rootana. Currently I have only implemented the crude TDC calibration into the TRB3 bank decoders. In the long run we may want to integrate the fine TDC calibration directly into the frontend.

Useful TRB3 commands

a) Get IDs for TRB3 FPGAs (1 central FPGA and 4 FPGAs for TDCs):

trb3_user@linux-klyr:~/lindner> trbcmd i 0xffff
0xc001  0xe1000006e937ac28  0x05
0x0100  0x9c000006e937a028  0x00
0x0101  0x91000006e95e8328  0x01
0x0102  0x75000006e9383128  0x02
0x0103  0xe6000006e96e5228  0x03

b) Print out raw TDCs for the events that are coming in through event builder

hldprint localhost:6789 -onlytdc 0x0100 -num 0 

c) Print out raw TDCs for events in file

hldprint //data/trb3_data/pulser17342114715.hld -onlytdc 0x0100 -num 0 

d) Print out raw data stream from EB

hldprint localhost:6789 -raw

e) "Ping of death" somehow ping board to reboot it:

ping  -pc001 trb171