TRB3 GSI Opensuse instructions

The following is instructions for reading out the TRB3 using the software packages that GSI provided, running on an Opensuse machine.

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.

Start-up Instructions

These are the basic instructions to initialize and take data from TRB3, using the GSI DAQ tools. Currently run as trb3@daq14 (an opensuse 42.3 machine)

1) Start the trb3 program and initialize the TRB3

cd ~/trbsoft/daqtools/users/triumf_trb171
source startup.sh

2) Start event builder: In new terminal, do

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

3) ) Start webbrowser: In new terminal, do

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

open webbrowser and go to

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

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...

TDC calibration

The concept of the FPGA-TDC calibration is described here:

http://dabc.gsi.de/doc/dabc2/hadaq_tdc_calibr.html

One important summary from that document: we require ~1e5 random hits for every channel in order to build up an individual fine counter calibration for each channel.

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 ~/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...