Roma, P. Camarri 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.

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

Roma, P. Camarri DAQ front panel (old)

Roma, P. Camarri Acquisition procedure 1. Hexadecimal word readout from TDCs. 2. “Data flag” check. 3. If “data flag”=TRUE, 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 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).

Roma, P. Camarri DAQ performance during the July 2002 test Beam + “source off”: > 3000 events/spill Beam + “source=10”: > 2000 events/spill Beam + “source=5”: > 1000 events/spill

Roma, P. Camarri 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.

Roma, P. Camarri Comments The system has shown pretty satisfactory speed, reliability and robustness. Taken ~ 10 7 events within 4 days’ data taking in July The system is scalable very simply to include a higher number of modules.

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